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Book_ "FT _ 

Copyright '4 


COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 




















PROPHETS UNAWARES 











PROPHETS UNAWARES 


THE ROMANCE OF AN IDEA 


BY 

LUCIEN PRICE 

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THE CENTURY CO. 

New York and London 

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Copyright, 1924, by 
The Centuby Co. 



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PRINTED IN U. S. A. 

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©OYKYAIAOY I2TOPION B 42 

[For if I have chanted the glories of the city it wa9 
these men and their like who made Athens great . . .] 


—Thucydides 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 

L IKE a good many other people I always 
wanted to write a college story. But 
also like a good many other people I never 
could quite bring myself to do it. For noth¬ 
ing that occurs in the ordinary life of an ordi¬ 
nary college ever seemed quite worth writing 
about. The stage-setting was picturesque, the 
characters interesting; but nothing ever 
seemed to happen. Or, if it did, what of it! 
None of the major passions were evoked. It 
was a place where life was theorized about 
rather than lived. If you wrote about the 
heats and fevers which animated the under¬ 
graduates, your themes rarely rose above the 
estate of calf-love and football games. If you 
wrote about the concerns which animated the 
faculty you were likely to find yourself in a 
realm no higher than a parish stir. A world of 
parochial loyalties. The college setting seemed 


4 PROPHETS UNAWARES 

too remote and too sheltered from the storms 
of modern life to serve as a theater for its liv¬ 
ing issues. For these the stage was much more 
properly a strike headquarters. 

Then, for a season, all unexpectedly, a col¬ 
lege did become a theater of living issues. In 
a remote and sightly New England town and 
a venerable institution of learning, on a stage 
of classic porticos and red-brick Georgian fa¬ 
cades, against a back drop of Pelham Hills, 
Holyoke Range, and the green valley of the 
Connecticut, with a small band of sincere and 
earnest men and a large one of ardent and 
generous youth, was dramatized that conflict 
which is now as ever rending and remaking 
the world. The whole modern struggle was 
suddenly brought to focus in this placid seat of 
academic learning: you could study its proc¬ 
esses as under a microscope; its action and 
reaction on varying types of personality; its 
reenactment of historic crises. You could see 
with what economy of means—with how few 
situations and those how simply constructed— 
the Great Dramatist carries forward the plot 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


5 


of human development, and how either the 
same or similar characters recur to play the 
same parts. And just as a divine significance 
can ray out of any object at any time to the 
perception of a mind and spirit in attune—out 
of a flowering tree or a gravel walk—so the 
significance of a creative idea rayed out of the 
beacon-fire which was kindled on the college 
hill at Amherst. 

And so I find myself writing what I had 
long since ceased to contemplate—a college 
story, set amidst magnificent scenery, against 
the interfolding hill-contours of historic back¬ 
ground and tradition; a story with an intel¬ 
lectual content, irradiated with the glow and 
glamour of youth, and with the heightened zest 
of all the characters being real people still 
living and breathing (though most of them now 
breathing other than Connecticut Valley air) 
and all the events being actual happenings 
of the not very distant past; and, best of all, 
with a decided bearing on the quandaries which 
are confronting all of us together in this our 
modern muddle. Here at last is a college story 


6 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


which seems worth telling by a grown person 
for grown people. In it we can have drama, 
scholarship, yonth, adventure, whimsy, ro¬ 
mance, and, perhaps, prophecy. So here goes. 


I 


T HE story begins—of all places—on a Nan- 
tasket steamboat in Boston Harbor. It 
was the summer of 1913. Chatting casually 
with a youngster whom I had seen grow up on 
the sea-beaches of Hull—a good swimmer, a 
clever sailor, a deft arm at tennis, well bred; 
but certainly no one to be singled out as likely 
to become an intellectual heavy-weight—it ap¬ 
peared that he had been for the past year at 
Amherst College. Next, that he was undis- 
guisedly interested in his studies. (Indeed!) 
Which ones? The whole lot of them. But es¬ 
pecially contemporary English literature, 
Who? Well, Shaw, Chesterton, Belloc, Gals¬ 
worthy, Wells, Hardy, and so on. What was 
more, he did not discuss them as literary gentle¬ 
men only, after the manner of such college men 
as in those days discussed these gentlemen at 
all. He spoke of them in relation to the 
thought and social problems of our time—in a 
7 


8 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


way I had not imagined one college undergrad¬ 
uate in hundreds could do; and, of the period, 
I think this was true. 

Had you been feeling rather glum about the 
spiritual sterility of the educated classes, and 
the intellectual standardized quantity produc- 
tion of our colleges, this gleam of intelligence 
would have been a welcome adventure. What 
could be the meaning of the portent? Was he 
a sole and single phenomenon; or were there 
more where he came from: others who knew a 
hawk from a hand-saw in the modern world? 
Plenty more, it appeared. How did it hap¬ 
pen? 

“Well, you see,” explains the youngster, “it 
is mostly the doing of this man Meiklejohn, our 
new president.” 

“He has only been there one year.” 

“Yes. He is right on the job.” 

At that time Amherst College was to me no 
more than a red-ink dot on the academic map. 
I had never seen it, and never cared to see it. 
As an undergraduate of a large university 
where the winds of opinion blew strong and 
chill and you had to swim for your life, I had 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


9 


shared the prevailing scorn of small colleges 
as a kind of intellectual small-town existence. 
From a few personal friends who had gone 
there I had got the idea that Amherst was an 
agreeable, leisurely, semi-educational country 
club where by doing a modicum of work you 
could spend four pleasant years and como 
away with a college degree; that if you cared 
to work hard, no one would stop you, and there 
was a good deal to be had from a certain group 
of earnest and scholarly men; and, for the rest, 
that the social tone of the place was determined 
by a whist-playing academic smart set who 
went in for a little classical or scientific learn¬ 
ing on the side. One of these Amherst under¬ 
graduates of that period, sitting in on a Sun¬ 
day afternoon gathering of young males in a 
small Middle-Western college, when the enter¬ 
tainment consisted of Matthew Arnold’s 
“Tristram,” Italian folk-songs, piano sonatas 
of Beethoven, and a lively wrangle over the 
Darwinian theory, said afterward: 

*‘ You could live your whole four years at 
Amherst and never spend an afternoon like 
that.” 


10 PROPHETS UNAWARES 

“Why not?” 

“It just isn’t done.” 

Whether the foregoing is a true picture of 
Amherst prior to 1912 I do not know. Prob¬ 
ably not. And anyhow, the decade of 1900-10 
was, in education, what architects call “a 
bad period.” When I think of some of the 
boarding-house hash which passed for college 
education in those years in many another in¬ 
stitution, I doubt if the pot could afford to call 
the kettle black. 


It was at sunset of a May evening that I had 
my first glimpse of Amherst the town and Am¬ 
herst the college, and anything more lovely in 
the way of an academic landscape I hardly ex¬ 
pect to see, at least not in New England. You 
get off a dinky train which rambles up the 
gradual slope of Massachusetts from the sea- 
coast to where the foot-hills of the Berkshires 
mount guard over the Connecticut (it is more 
like a suburban street-car line with gossipy 
crew and passengers than it is like a railroad), 
and find yourself in a vast, green-floored river 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


11 


valley ringed with mountain ranges empurpled 
in evening shadow. Every way you look is 
something interesting. Here is a gray stone 
house set in a grove of black pines, built in 1853 
by an Englishman with squirearchial leanings 
—so gray and somber that its obvious name 
would be Dour House. At a later time it was 
occupied by a most buoyant and resolute soul, 
Professor Clarence Ayres of the philosophy 
department. In his day the house was haunted, 
and never was a merrier troop of ghosts than 
that band of young men who camped on his 
door-step to talk philosophy out of academic 
business hours and wore on their watch-chains 
little silver spades in emblem of the hot air 
that they rejoiced to shovel. 

You go up one of those gracious streets of 
an old New England town, with elm rows on 
each side and a common in the middle. First 
come the white, colonial homesteads with their 
thick chimneys, fan-lighted doorways, and blos¬ 
soming lilacs. Then, beyond and above, you 
see the lift of a hill, crested with trees, robed 
in green velvet turf, and, atop of it, the clas¬ 
sic white-pillared portico of an old college 


12 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


chapel flanked on either side by equally vener¬ 
able dormitories with walls of mellowed red 
brick, all fronting westward and flushed in a 
glory of rose pink from the setting sun. Rose 
pink on the new green of May foliage half 
budded; golden on the new-mown turf; flame 
red on the walls of weather-beaten brick where 
ivies have begun to etch their traceries of 
filmy green; and rose pink on the lofty white 
columns and pediment of the chapel portico. 
The beauty of May sunset on this academic 
scene was something to take your breath away. 
It was like seeing music. Was this a rebirth 
of Hellas on a New England hillside? For 
eleven years that is exactly what it was. 

Coming as I did from the race and roar of a 
city newspaper, Antechamber of Horrors to 
the world of events; living as I did on the edge 
of a city slum; jaded from too prolonged a con¬ 
templation of strikes, riots, murders, scan¬ 
dals, political chicane, financial scoundrelism, 
rumors of war, and titanic catastrophes by sea 
and by land, all those perfect flowers of a ma¬ 
chine civilization abloom on the front page of a 
daily paper and which Professor William 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


13 


James might have designated “Varieties of Ir¬ 
religious Experience, * ’ the idea which came 
uppermost at sight of this visionary Utopia ac¬ 
tually embodied in a New England college town 
was: 

“How do they expect to be able to prepare 
boys for the shindy of modern life in such a 
paradise as this?” 

That was what Amherst College, all unbe¬ 
knownst to me and my like, was preparing to 
demonstrate. 

You get your second shock of unreality when 
you see the Amherst fraternity-houses. Their 
splendor is disconcerting. You feel embar¬ 
rassed for them. Architecturally they are ex¬ 
cellent, examples of our recent recapture of 
the spirit of the Georgian style. But are these 
too-too stately mansions just the place to fit 
boys for functioning in a democratic society 
increasingly stratified by classes propertied 
and unpropertied? The foremost of them 
looks so like the manor-house of an ante-bellum 
plantation owner that |you instinctively look 
around for the slave quarters. The others are 
variously country club, North Shore villa, or 


14 PROPHETS UNAWARES 

suburban residence of the local manufacturer 
erecting a monument to his first half-million. 
To possess such dwellings of their own it would 
take most of these boys half a life time of com¬ 
mercial exploitation of their fellow-creatures. 
Will such houses give them the itch to live like 
this the rest of their days? Candor bids it be 
said that in most cases this does not happen. 
They seem to live in this splendor with the 
serene unconsciousness of childhood. And is 
fraternity the act of walking into a house and 
locking the door? These societies, at Amherst 
at least, do not work the mischief that you 
might expect. They are more like membership 
in a somewhat clannish dormitory freely acces¬ 
sible to non-members than the solemn hush- 
clubs of Yale or Harvard where the profane or 
non-intimate are hardly permitted to set foot. 
During the years from 1912 to 1923 the Am¬ 
herst fraternity-houses gave the same false im¬ 
pression of the place that you might get from 
mistaking a well bred, intelligent, and generous 
college youth for a snob because he happened 
to be a trifle too expensively tailored. 

For the rest, the college scene is about the 


PEOPHETS UNAWAEES 


15 


usual thing: a New England town green 
colonnaded with elms; two lecture-halls in all 
the staring atrocity of mid or late nineteenth 
century architecture—one a brick barracks, the 
other a pseudo-Gothic monstrosity; yonder a 
gracious old Parthenon used as a college- 
assembly-hall ; opposite, a new library of grave 
and reticent beauty to take the place of the 
gloomy stone mausoleum now doing duty as a 
Faculty Club. (Inquiring once at the height of 
fray whether the Faculty Club was as gloomy 
inside as it was outside, I was told, “It depends 
on who is there.”) A handsome new dormi¬ 
tory for freshmen, a spacious gymnasium, an 
assortment of laboratories and observatories 
new and old, statues to college worthies, a 
Eichardsonesque gray stone college church, 
and rows of professors y houses: people this 
with five hundred boys and instructors and 
you have stage and actors. 

In the beginning was the Idea. 

There is no romance about an idea? No 
thunder and guns, no plot, no adventure, no 
thrills, no fight, no victory or defeat, no catas¬ 
trophe and triumph? Ha! never believe it! 


16 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


Let the idea be a live one, and it is nothing 
but romance from beginning to end. And 
at this point it is only fair to warn the young: 
if you wish to keep out of hot water have noth¬ 
ing to do with ideas. Shun them. Break the 
ten Commandments if you must; defy the Jus¬ 
tinian Code; fracture the Thirty-nine Articles 
and the Nineteen Amendments; forge, libel, and 
insult the traffic officer; but if you value a quiet 
life, don’t touch an idea with a ten-foot pole. 

With this fair warning we will now visit that 
most dangerous of characters, a man with an 
idea. 

On a knoll of maples and elms overlooking 
the town green is a red-brick house in the 
colonial style, with white pilasters and portico, 
set up and back from the street amid lawns, 
terraces, and shrubberies. It is of later date 
than our best period of domestic architecture, 
but it has been remodeled by a hand that knew 
its trade, and is now the residence of the Am¬ 
herst college presidents. 

Pull the door-bell, and you are led down a 
long staircase hall past drawing-rooms of 
cream-white woodwork and paneled chimney- 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 17 

pieces, furnished in the semi-formalism of a 
salon meant to do duty for public receptions, 
yet contriving for all that to give the appear¬ 
ance of being lived in. Among the columns of 
the staircase hall stands a grand piano. Be¬ 
yond this you pass down a long corridor, rather 
dark, with a bewildering array of doors, to one 
at the end which usually stands open, into the 
study. 

Brown oak of paneling, wainscot, chimney- 
piece, and beamed ceiling. It is walled with 
books. There is an elbow-roomy Washington¬ 
ian desk of mahogany stacked with the usual 
volumes, papers, and implements of that impos¬ 
sible combination of qualities which we are 
still demanding of our college presidents: 
scholar and executive. The black oak arm¬ 
chair bears a brass plate to say that it was used 
by President Hitchcock. The other chairs and 
tables have a consular curve and flourish to 
them, touches of ormulu and gilding, and up¬ 
holstery in alternate stripes of gray and mul¬ 
berry reminiscent of the fasces, wreaths, and 
urns of the Empire. The hearth is wide 
enough for a three-foot log. A noble room, 


18 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


which furthermore gives the impression of be¬ 
ing prodigiously worked in. 

And the oocupant? In 1914 he is a slender, 
young-looking man, of a little less than aver¬ 
age height, brisk and supple in his motions as 
befits the good baseball and tennis player. 
Behind his spectacles sparkle a pair of blue- 
gray eyes, which, for all their kindliness and 
candor, you suspect can be formidable in their 
ability to see through things. He is cordial, 
and just a bit diffident. No “side.” It is 
clear that he is not in the least humbugged by 
the social altitude of his position. In conversa¬ 
tion he is instantly ready to come to brass tacks. 
Not an iota of pose; never a hint of intellectual 
pretentiousness; not a shadow of pomposity. 
On the contrary a distinct note of humility: of 
readiness and anxiety to learn, be it from any 
source whatsoever. 

In 1914 unemployment was acute and tragic. 
We talked of it. Unlike most of his class and 
profession he spoke without beating around the 
bush: 

“We derive our support, if endowed col- 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 19 

leges, largely from the rich. So whatever we 
do, people will say we are ‘owned/ Whether 
the source of our income will affect our liberty 
of thought or action remains to he seen. I 
think the most that the colleges can do is tell 
the boys what is happening, open their eyes 
and minds, and leave them to judge for them¬ 
selves and choose their sides.” 

The failure of professors of economics to 
sense as situations of desperate human suffer¬ 
ing such predicaments as unemployment was 
mentioned. 

“Aren’t they,” said he, “trying to get at it 
scientifically V 9 

“ Is n’t this deemotionalized thinking, so ele¬ 
vated by the colleges as an ideal, a stetrile 
thing?” 

“We want emotion to start the thinking,” he 
replied. “But we want none in the thinking.” 

“Radicalism seems to increase inversely as 
the square of the distance of one’s contact with 
the poor. This willingness of scholars to ‘take 
their time ’ about matters which involve the suf¬ 
fering of millions, and this on a comfortable 


20 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


margin of three meals a day, looks like willing¬ 
ness that the world be redeemed by suffering— 
but the suffering of somebody else . 9 ’ 

“ There is the question. Should we do it 
hastily, or shall we relieve more suffering and 
relieve it more permanently by taking more 
time? I admit, it must look pretty despicable 
to those who are down in the mire, helping the 
fallen—the way the upper classes palter and 
hesitate. ’ 9 

“I would like to see your youngsters more 
concerned than they are.” 

“I should be very sorry,” said he, amiably 
firm, -“to see the boys plunge into this matter 
and try to mend it. They would be blundering 
and immature, more harm than help. They 
drive me to my wits’ end now, wanting to be 
over in the mill cities of Holyoke and North¬ 
ampton teaching working-men before they have 
learned their own lessons.’’ 

“Good for them!” 

“They have a whole lifetime for that, and 
only four years to acquire some habits of or¬ 
derly, logical thinking on which to base their ac¬ 
tion. That is my job to teach them.” 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 21 

Throughout that hour of lively give-and- 
take, well aware that he was being politely 
heckled by a radical, a somewhat rabid one, 
and an utter stranger to boot, his good temper 
was unruffled, and never once did he mount 
the podium of official dignity. All was candor, 
kindliness, and poise. Is it any wonder that 
Young Men in a Hurry who came to heckle re¬ 
mained to admire? 


There seems to be a notion prevalent among 
us that a thinker is a queer bird who rarely if 
ever hatches any eggs. We are all for the 
doer. Give us the man of action. 

Does it ever occur to us that a thought of 
some sort, even a murderous one, must precede 
every act? Does it ever occur to us that the 
doer is little more than the errand-boy of the 
thinker, and that there is no power on earth 
to match the power of an idea? 

Before Amherst College could become the 
place it was between 1912 and 1923, some one 
had to do some tall thinking. And he did. 

The young dean from Brown University who 


22 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


was asked by the trustees of Amherst to 4 ‘take 
the college and make something out of it” had 
looked around him and seen exactly what Ibsen 
saw: a world given over to specialists, each 
immersed in his own specialty and scarcely one 
of them knowing or caring where their special¬ 
ties fitted into the total scheme of things—in¬ 
deed, resenting the suggestion that it was their 
business to know. He saw an intellectual 
world which had been jostled out of that unifica¬ 
tion which it had enjoyed under the old classic 
curriculum by the inrush of new material de¬ 
bouched upon it in an age of scientific discov¬ 
ery. And before this could be wrought into a 
new unity, he saw that an age of industrial 
machinery had disrupted our old scheme of hu¬ 
man relationships, in government, in bread¬ 
winning, in religion, and in the family, and that 
matters which we had long considered settled 
would have to be rethought. He saw all this 
chaos expressed in our educational system. 
The commercial classes were clamoring that the 
colleges train them skilled employees. The 
classicists were demanding that the colleges re¬ 
fuse to budge an inch from their august and sa- 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 23 

cred precints. Universities were devouring 
their colleges bite by bite in the relegation to 
them of more and more preparatory courses 
for their professional schools. Furthermore, 
the new scientific material had in most cases 
been added to the college curriculum like the 
ell, lean-to, and successive sheds and stables of 
a New England farm-house, each tacked on to 
the next in a series of afterthoughts more pic¬ 
turesque than commodious. These sheds and 
lean-tos were entered by innumerable side 
doors known as the elective system—an easy 
access but rather bewildering once you were in. 
And you were frequently allowed to suppose 
that one door was about as good as another, 
with the natural inference that the wood-shed 
was just as suitable an abiding-place as the par¬ 
lor. The magic ring of the Nibelungen which 
had been lost or forfeited to the giants of chaos 
was a unified conception of life. 

Now the errand-boys, the men of action, con¬ 
tent to do as they are told without asking why 
—to obey old customs, to fight when the bugle 
blows, and kneel when the bell rings—may be 
able to get along quite comfortably without 


24 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


such an article. But when you get a mind ca¬ 
pable of questioning, able to take in immense 
ranges of experience, one of its key character¬ 
istics is that it can hardly express itself at all 
until it has brought those masses of material 
into some sort of classification. The set of 
pigeonholes it adopts may not be final or even 
accurate, but at least it permits the creative 
mind to function. The most amusing instance 
of this that I know is the joy with which Rich¬ 
ard Wagner hailed his encounter with the 
works of Schopenhauer. Here, he felt, was a 
set of pigeonholes which exactly suited him. 
What matter if their classification declared that 
life w^as not worth living and that the logical 
course was to go down to the end of the wharf 
and jump off? Given an imperious will to 
create, we can create beauty out of despair. 
Give us a legend of Tristan and Isolde, and we 
will set pessimism to music so gorgeous that 
all Europe will take up the strain and sing, 
“Hurrah! Life is not worth living!” Give 
us a rousing tune, and the words may be what 
you please. Give us beauty, and we will swal¬ 
low your message at a gulp. 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 25 

And similarly, give us a unified conception of 
life, and the particular set of pigeonholes we 
use can be left for time and experience to rear¬ 
range. 

And so, as the young man from Brown Uni¬ 
versity takes office as president of Amherst, 
you hear him saying: 

“The technical and professional schools train 
for specific tasks. The liberal college views 
human effort as a whole and strives to unify it 
. . . the whole college course will be dominated 
by a single interest, a single purpose—that of 
so understanding human life as to be ready and 
equipped for the practice of it.” 

How unified? By that most lauded and least 
practised of feats, simplification. First, you 
guide the student in his choice of studies until 
he is able to guide himself; that is, you modify 
the elective system by requiring certain stud¬ 
ies which are central to modern thought until 
he finds his own footing from which he is able 
to do his own choosing; say, four required sub¬ 
jects and one elective in freshman year, the 
proportion gradually changing till he has one 
required and four elective studies in his senior 


26 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


year. And what shall he study? Those things 
which give unity to human life: the ideas which 
have, whether we know it or not, made us what 
we are—philosophy, the history of human 
thought; then the institutions which express 
and mold us—property, the courts, the family, 
the church, the mill; then the stage on which 
this drama is played—earth and heavens—ge¬ 
ology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology; 
next, the history of the past, the pit from which 
we were digged or the hills from which we are 
descended—history; and with these, those bur- 
geonings of the artist mind which thinks in pic¬ 
tures, which sets forth its unified conceptions of 
all this multiform life in literature, painting, 
sculpture, music, and architecture. Finally, 
these studies are to be welded together into an 
interpretation of the student’s own experience 
and clearly related to the world in which he 
lives. . . . 

“If this could be done, I think we should get 
from the reality-loving American boy some¬ 
thing like an intellectual enthusiasm, something 
of the spirit that comes when he plays a game 
that seems to be really worth playing.” 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


27 


These words, uttered in 1912, were pro¬ 
phetic. They prophesied that group of scholar 
athletes which I saw at Amherst a few years 
later when fifty per cent of a senior class went 
on into some sort of graduate study—a group 
which could put forth time and again what else¬ 
where would have been anomaly, football cap¬ 
tains who were members of the Phi Beta Kappa 
Society 1 as a preliminary sketch to a race of 
Americans who should be both thinkers and 
men of action. 

But the words which follow were also des¬ 
tined to become prophetic in a different sense: 

“I do not believe this result can be achieved 
without a radical reversal of the arrangement 
of the college curriculum . 9 9 

No sooner does a man propose an ascent of 
the hills of heaven than he is told that the hills 
of earth are quite good enough. 

The curriculum he did in large part remold; 
with trustees, faculty, and alumni he prevailed 

i Happening once to mention this row of four football cap¬ 
tains who were members of the Phi Beta Kappa Society to 
a fellow-craftsman, I was told coolly: “You lie. There 
is no such animal. And if there were, any American college 
which had one in captivity—let alone four—would keep it in 
» cage and charge admission at ten cents a head.” 


28 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


for a time with varying fortunes. But the one 
body which he remolded most completely was 
the one which most counts, the students. And 
these words from the Inaugural were destined 
to be the most prophetic of all: 

“ Surely it is one function of the liberal col¬ 
lege to save boys from . . . stupidity, to give 
them an appetite for the pleasures of thinking, 
to make them sensitive to the joys of apprecia¬ 
tion and understanding, to show them how 
sweet and captivating and wholesome are the 
games of the mind. At the time when the play 
element is still dominant, it is worth while to 
acquaint boys with the sport of facing and 
solving problems. Apart from some of the ex¬ 
periences of friendship and sympathy, I doubt 
if there are any human interests so perma¬ 
nently satisfying, so tine and splendid in them¬ 
selves, as are those of intellectual activity. To 
give our boys that zest, that delight in things in¬ 
tellectual, to give them an appreciation of a 
kind of life which is well worth living, to make 
them men of intellectual culture—that certainly 
is one part of the work of any liberal college.’’ 

Two articles are rare in any age. One is the 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 29 

will to excel in thought. The other is the will 
to excel in conduct. One is intellect. The 
other is religion. Both are at bottom parts of 
the same thing; both are repeatedly slain, by 
the bowl of hemlock in one age, by the fumes 
of mediocrity in another; yet both burst their 
tombs and walk forth into life again in each 
successive generation. Resurrection or renais¬ 
sance, it is all the same thing. In the beginning 
was the Thought. The Thinker translated it 
into the language of deed; and, during the dec¬ 
ade which followed, the words of the Inaugural 
became flesh and dwelt in Amherst in the per¬ 
sons of scores if not hundreds of young men, 
awakened to a meaning and purpose in modern 
life. 


n 


HE stultifying fact of our time is the ig- 



1 norance of the educated man. The sur¬ 
geon is, I suppose, the finest human product 
of the scientific age: he represents scientific 
knowledge dedicated to the relief of suffering. 
And yet I have heard one of the most eminent 
surgeons in New England, a man of infinite 
mercy and kindness, declare that the proper 
way to deal with strikers was ‘ 4 amputation by 
machine-gun . 9 9 When it was pointed out to 
him that this remark was quite as if an un¬ 
schooled layman were to volunteer to operate 
in a case of cancer, he admitted that it was 
true: 

“I have been so busy mastering my profes¬ 
sion that I know nothing about the world ex¬ 
cept what I see in my practice. Everybody is 
a specialist nowadays.’’ 

Here is the predicament of our age. We are 
living in a society where people are supposed 


30 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


31 


to have competent judgments on subjects of 
which they are, as a matter of fact, grotesquely 
ignorant. This ignorance extends from sex to 
religion, but it is most perilous, for the time be¬ 
ing, where it touches property. It is no re¬ 
proach to the average citizen that he does not 
know how to handle a surgeon’s scalpel. It is 
a matter of grave concern that the average citi¬ 
zen does not know how to handle an industrial 
dispute. 

Laws, institutions, customs, beliefs, creeds, 
constitutions, covenants—the merest foliage of 
life, green to-day, to-morrow sere and yellow 
—we accept without question, and view as eter¬ 
nal. And when they fail to meet the changing 
needs of human existence we conceive ourselves 
to be monstrously injured by the failure of the 
elements to obey some staff of office which we 
had come to regard as a magician’s wand. 
You may know the disease from the gait of 
modern society. Courts, church, press, school, 
platform, stage: it attacks the joints. It is 
the locomotor ataxia of the intellect. 

The student in a liberal college “should see 
what is intended, what accomplished, and what 


32 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


left undone by such institutions as property, 
the courts, the family, the church, the mill.” 
Thus spoke the Inaugural of Amherst’s new 
president. 

“What! Allow boys to question the very 
foundations of the society in which they live? 
Property? Courts? Family? Church? Fac¬ 
tory system?” 

The Thinker is ready and waiting for you. 
He has been on the ground this long time. He 
got up before it was light to be ready for the 
sunrise: 

“I have known fathers planning for the 
training of a son, who would see to it that in 
the preparation for his trade every bit of 
knowledge he can have is supplied him. But 
how often the same father is unwilling that his 
boy attempt to understand his own religion, his 
own morals, his own society, his own politics! 
In these fields surely the father’s opinions are 
good enough! Keep the boy’s mind at rest re¬ 
garding his religion and his economics; what 
has been believed before had better still be be¬ 
lieved ! It may be bad for business, may inter- 
fore with a boy’s success if he becomes too 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


33 


much interested in the fundamental things of 
life! And so such parents wish us to leave the 
universal things, the things most sacred and 
significant, to blindness, to the mere drift of 
custom, to tradition and rule of thumb . 9 9 

This thinking became an act in the autumn' 
of 1914. A course on Social and Economic 
Institutions for freshmen was put into the cur¬ 
riculum. It was elective, but most of each 
freshman class chose it. The course was 
unique. Nietzsche somewhere remarks how we 
briskly assume that because a custom has be¬ 
come established it must necessarily have been 
because it was the best among several, but that 
this by no means follows. Other colleges have 
had their courses in government and economics, 
but mostly conducted in the tone of “whatever 
is is all for the best in this best possible of 
worlds.” The course at Amherst was a frank 
examination of merits, defects, and alterna¬ 
tives, and it turned out boys who at the end of 
their freshman year had at least some elemen¬ 
tary knowledge of the why and wherefore of 
the social scheme in which they lived. 

To any one who has spent years of study and 


34 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


thought and the sweat of soul on quandaries 
propounded by this social dis-order of ours, the 
most devastating of all experiences is to fall 
into conversation on some one of its snarls with 
an average citizen, submit to having ears boxed 
with nonsense, and find that he, who has not 
given fifteen minutes 9 thought a week to it, re¬ 
gards his accidental collection of inherited prej¬ 
udices and instinctive class reactions quite as 
competent a body of opinions as those of the 
laborious student and thinker. If these opin¬ 
ions were on surgery where he would never be 
asked or allowed to wield the scalpel, this ig¬ 
norance might be relatively harmless. But in 
a nominally democratic society where govern¬ 
ment is conducted, in theory at least, by an ap¬ 
peal to public opinion, such quackery is fraught 
with hideous possibilities of disaster. It makes 
possible, or even inevitable, a species of govern¬ 
ment by stampede, manceuvered by those who 
understand the art of herd-suggestion and 
mob-hysteria of a type, which, during the past 
seven years, we have been abundantly privi¬ 
leged to observe. The only remedy is to let 
people understand the social processes by which 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


35 


they live and earn their livings, to let them 
examine the sanctions or defects of these, and 
develop a wholesome skepticism and a coolly 
critical attitude toward that whole mass of data 
which is offered them as food for opinion: the 
bias of a newspaper, the leanings of a speaker, 
the income-sources of an institution, the con¬ 
fused origins of religious thought, the fact that 
an apparent political democracy like their own 
may be governed by a small and compact ruling 
class. 

In a nation of one hundred million, what is 
a class of one hundred and twenty boys a year 
in Social and Economic Institutions? It is a 
beginning. And since it was begun, at least 
eight other colleges have copied the course. 
And what are colleges in dealing with these 
millions when only two per cent of our total 
population ever reach the estate of college 
graduates ? College graduates can be articulate. 
They speak through press, pulpit, business, and 
profession. One of the awkward results of the 
four years of liberal thought in Amherst Col¬ 
lege was that it frequently made the sons of 
upper- and middle-class families zealous to lib- 


36 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


erate those whom their fathers exploited. The 
old gentleman’s office chair looked less alluring 
once you had had a look at the mountain land¬ 
scape of some creative career. 

One hundred and twenty boys a year in a 
nation of one hundred million; but the progress 
of all thought is from the few to the many. 
Whether to work intensively with the few or to 
harangue the multitude, this was a question 
which kept coming up all through the lifetime 
of the liberal experiment at Amherst. Some 
answered it one way and some another. One 
of the professors of economics was chafing at 
the smallness and immaturity of his classes at 
the same time when Scott Nearing, who has 
harangued the multitude to some effect if any 
one has, was remarking that he wondered 
whether, after all, a few students continuously 
in contact with the ideas, as you had them in 
an academic environment, might not be the 
more effectual method. Some did both. Otto 
Glaser, professor of biology, took fliers in popu¬ 
lar journalism. Walton Hamilton and Stacy 
May taught economics to boys and collaborated 
on a volume dealing with the wage-problem in 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 37 

popular vein. Albert Parker Fitch (of whom 
more presently) taught history of religion and 
biblical literature in Amherst on week-days and 
on Sundays preached in city and college 
churches anywhere within Atlantic seaboard 
radius of the Connecticut Valley; and Mr. Mei- 
klejohn went them all one better by playing 
helmsman to the institution, teaching logic and 
metaphysics in it, and using his position as a 
rostrum from which on occasion to address the 
multitude. 

All of which indicates why Amherst should 
have come to have an importance out of all pro¬ 
portion to its size. It dealt one of the first 
blows to our reigning American idol of stand¬ 
ardized quantity production of intellect. Size T 
It had broken away from the cult of size. It 
was among institutions the equivalent of the 
man who can hear the voice of his own con¬ 
science above the herd-bellow of majorities. It 
had rediscovered the repeatedly lost faith that 
quality will be able to make its way irrespective 
of quantity. Matters had in some sort been 
here thought through by this band of scholars 
which in the life of most academic communities, 


38 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


to say nothing of the world at large, are hardly 
thought about at all: not only some unity of 
the college curriculum, but some unity of mod¬ 
ern thought; and not only some relating of this 
to the life of action which young men will be ex¬ 
pected to live in the world of to-day, but some 
formulation of that action in terms of intellec¬ 
tual endeavor. You had at least a nautical 
chart and a plan of voyage. As time went on 
and the experiment matured it was increasingly 
clear that this was to have been the unique 
value of Amherst: it was an experiment station. 
The unit was small and therefore wieldy. If 
something proved workable here it could be 
adopted elsewhere. It was a pioneer college: 
it blazed the trail, scrutinized the soil, and 
made the clearing. If all was well, it kindled 
a signal-fire on a height, and others could fol¬ 
low along the trail. 

And so I think the most dramatic single in¬ 
novation among many, was the course later 
known to college slang as “S. and E. I.”— 
Social and Economic Institutions. It was this 
which made an intellectual encounter with 
many an Amherst graduate (or undergradu- 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


39 


ate) so startlingly different from those with 
most other college men. I have in mind the 
standardized quantity product all too generally 
turned out of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dart¬ 
mouth, and a dozen more institutions, unless, 
by the grace of some inborn vitality and tough¬ 
ness of fiber, the brain has resisted conven¬ 
tionalization; I mean the youth formidably, 
even magnificently equipped with cultural 
knowledge, armed to the teeth for personal 
careerism, and chewing the cud of every con¬ 
ventional idea of life and society and morality 
and property as placidly as any noontide cow. 
Your Amherst man might be ultraconservative ; 
he might be liberal; he might be radical. But 
whatever he was he could generally give a 
reason which you were bound to respect. Two 
things distinguished him from the ruck of col¬ 
lege men: when it came to social questions he 
knew what he was talking about; and, above 
all, he was willing and able to think for him¬ 
self. With the exception of those sporadic 
thinkers who will survive the stultification of 
any college environment, I have no hesitation 
in saying that a steadily increasing proportion 


40 PROPHETS UNAWARES 

of the men turned out of Amherst between 1915 
and 1923 were among the few oases in that des¬ 
ert of the intellect where we sow solid ivory 
and reap green cheese, where, in attempting to 
discuss social questions fraught with the is¬ 
sues of triumph or disaster, you discover that 
you are trying to talk integral calculus with 
people who have not yet so much as learned 
their multiplication tables. 

How can you expect a college to allow young¬ 
sters to question the very institutions of prop¬ 
erty and the very processes of industry from 
which it derives its support ? Can such freedom 
of inquiry be tolerated for any considerable 
length of time? Amherst, for a small college, is 
a very rich one. It has, I believe, about nine 
million dollars ’ worth of property. What if, 
after critical scrutiny, some of your vigorous- 
minded youngsters conclude that the labor 
required to produce the income from the great 
endowment is too high a price to pay for the 
education of five hundred boys? What if they 
conclude that a system which educates a few at 
the expense of the many is monstrous? What 
if they use their newly whetted powers to com- 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 41 

pute that it takes the manual labor of ten men 
annually to give one boy this college instruc¬ 
tion? What if such conclusions offend prospec¬ 
tive donors ? What if their ideas alarm 
wealthy and conservative graduates? It 
speaks bugle-blasts for the hardihood of those 
who conducted the Amherst experiment that 
they should have been willing to lavish such 
labor and pains on an enterprise which they 
knew must of necessity be such a fragile ves¬ 
sel. That the odds were terrific they knew. 
They knew that, their economic basis and the 
beleaguering social prejudices being what they 
were, the whole endeavor had structural weak¬ 
ness. They knew that a sudden turn of events, 
a maladroit action, even an unguarded public 
utterance, might go far to ditch the whole out¬ 
fit. Yet they kept on. And the spirit in which 
Mr. Meiklejohn met such difficulties may be 
gathered from something he said in private 
conversation as early as the autumn of 1914: 

“Before I came here to Amherst I had never 
had any contact with rich men, knew nothing of 
that class. Since then, I have come to know a 
small group of them well, and, I must own, to 


42 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


admire them. They honestly desire a social 
betterment. I have in mind one whom I would 
match with any man I know for a sincere de¬ 
sire to improve conditions; and he is a man 
who wields power and is one of the hated 
ones. . . . The trouble is that none of them can 
see anything beyond the present order. De¬ 
molish this, and they think all is lost. Perhaps 
the best thing the colleges can do is train up 
a new generation which can see beyond the 
present order.’’ 

As time went on much of the work in the 
course on Social and Economic Institutions fell 
to an able and admirable young man named 
John Gaus. He had been graduated from Am¬ 
herst, and after study elsewhere returned to 
become assistant professor of political science. 
Highly individual though he is, I like to think 
of him as a type, and a type which we need as 
instructors of youth: a robust and hearty stal¬ 
wart with a strong sense of humor, a candid 
spirit of inquiry, a voracious appetite for read¬ 
ing, a genial soul, and withal a rugged sort of 
comeliness. One saw that he would wear well. 
The older men spoke of him with a mingling 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


43 


of respect and affection. One of them said: 

“It is a great help to have a fellow like that 
working alongside of you. He has youth, and 
strength, and there is something heroic about 
him.” 

This young dynamo was wired up to the 
freshmen, and only a fortnight before the cy¬ 
clone of June, 1923, struck the college, he was 
wrestling with himself over a hid from a West¬ 
ern university to come out there and institute a 
similar course where it would energize a fresh¬ 
man class of a thousand boys—and resolving to 
stay on in Amherst partly out of loyalty to its 
president and partly because he, too, had out¬ 
grown the cult of size. 

In a published article on “S. and E. I.,” 
Gaus mentions that the class is divided into 
sections of from fifteen to thirty students each. 
And he adds, “The class-room method is 
largely a guided discussion.” 

In that phrase lies the most Hellenic element 
of the Amherst experiment. It was a return 
to the agora of Athens and the groves of the 
Academe. 

“It seems to me,” President Meiklejohn had 


44 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


written, ‘ * that we need to-day a Socrates to 
come again as Socrates of old to Athens.’’ 

Whether Socrates came, you can believe or 
not, as you like; but the Socratic method most 
assuredly did come. 

One morning I wandered into one of Albert 
Parker Fitch’s classes in the history of reli¬ 
gion. There were about thirty-five boys. Any¬ 
thing more totally unlike the usual cut-and- 
dried lecture or perfunctory recitation you 
would have been put to it to imagine. They 
were in the period of the break-up of the Ro¬ 
man Empire and the rise of the Christian 
Church. Fitch had certain factual material he 
wanted brought out and impressed on their 
minds, material which they were supposed to 
have worked up before coming to class. But 
he also wanted discussion on the questions of 
life, conduct, organization, institutions, govern¬ 
ment, religious thought, and historical tenden¬ 
cies involved in those facts. And he had it. 
At least twenty of the thirty-five were keen on 
the subject, eager to be heard, and prepared 
to say things worth hearing. There was collab¬ 
orative production of ideas, wit, repartee, and 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 45 

a general glow of mental exhilaration. One of 
the jokes Fitch cracked at the expense of the 
boys I heard being gleefully passed around the 
college next day. And they in turn chaffed 
him on an addiction to mouth-filling words. 
One of his nicknames was “Fundamental 
Fitch” (and he being sniped at all the while by 
the Fundamentalists!). ... At the end of the 
hour the students left the class-room refreshed, 
invigorated, and ready for more. And the pro¬ 
fessor? I said to him: 

“This goes like a house afire, but isn’t it 
pretty hard work?” 

“Hard work! It is absolutely exhausting. 
After three consecutive hours of it you are 
squeezed as dry as a lemon.” 

“How do some of the older men, who were 
here before the present administration, stand 
it?” 

Fitch’s only reply was a smile—a smile of 
the cat that has just swallowed the canary. I 
was left to infer that most of the elder brethren 
were entered in some other event than these 
high hurdles. 

Brilliantly as Fitch did it, I am told that Wal- 



46 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


ton Hamilton of the economics department did 
it more brilliantly still. I was also given to 
understand that with the exception of the presi¬ 
dent’s own, Hamilton’s was the strongest sin¬ 
gle formative influence in the place. With 
some of his more advanced students Hamilton 
would take into class material on which he was 
himself working, thresh it out with his boys, 
and come away richer by several ideas. The 
effect of a man of ability and intellect sharing 
his problems with his students and adopting 
their suggestions wherever these are of value 
is not hard to guess. You give a boy intellec¬ 
tual self-respect; you make him a Somebody. 
Life and responsibility are not a to-be; they are 
a now. 

Of course it takes men of high caliber to do 
this sort of thing. But these were just the sort 
of men with whom Mr. Meiklejohn was gradu¬ 
ally surrounding himself. Some were already 
at Amherst when he arrived. (Some are there 
still.) Others he added as fast as vacancies oc¬ 
curred. At the same time it should be re¬ 
marked that all college subjects do not lend 
themselves to this kind of dialectic. But even 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


47 


where they did not, the aim was less to impart 
information than to stimulate minds. The 
older conception of college training is as an 
assemblage of jugs filled to their muzzles out of 
a professorial demijohn pouring forth oral 
streams of fact. Or the student is a sponge. 
He soaks in knowledge to the saturation point. 
Then, by a written examination, you squeeze 
him and see if what comes out is equal to what 
went in. If so, his mark is A plus or one hun¬ 
dred per cent. After four years of this his 
education is complete. That is, ended. After 
four years of the Amherst method, his educa¬ 
tion was begun. It was to continue the rest of 
his life, and, in many, if not most cases, I think 
it will. 

The machine age, and especially that tragi¬ 
cally adolescent part of it known as the twen¬ 
tieth century, has been betrayed into a pecu¬ 
liarly fatuous habit of preening itself on sup¬ 
posed superiority to the past because of its com¬ 
mand over new-found resources of production, 
travel, and communication. That is, you are to 
understand, any languid satrap of the Chamber 
of Commerce listening to “The Livery- 


48 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


Stable Blues ’ 9 (which proves to be the 
“Halleluiah Chorus” done into jazz) by radio 
represents a prodigious advance over Beetho¬ 
ven, who never had a pair of receivers to his 
ears—or, for that matter, poor fellow, could 
have heard anything if he had; or, for that mat¬ 
ter, would have wanted to hear if he could. 
We are likewise the natural superiors of Plato, 
Michelangelo, and Goethe because we can ride 
in airplanes and talk by telephone. To this 
travesty Gilbert Murray makes reply: 

If Harvey discovers that the blood is not station¬ 
ary but circulates, if Copernicus discovers that the 
earth goes round the sun and not the sun round the 
earth, those discoveries can easily be communicated 
in the most abbreviated form. If the mechanic puts 
an improvement on the telephone, in a few years we 
shall probably all be using the improvement without 
even knowing what it is or saying thank you. We 
may be as stupid as we like, we have in a sense got 
the good of it. But can one apply the same process 
to “Macbeth” or “Romeo and Juliet”? Can any one 
tell us in a few words what they come to? Or can 
a person get the good of them in any way except 
one—the way of vivid and loving study, following 
and feeling the author’s meaning all through? . . . 
The things that we have called eternal, the things 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 49 

of the spirit and imagination, always seem to be 
more in a process than in a result, and can only be 
reached and enjoyed by somehow going through the 
process again. 

It was as a process that education at Am¬ 
herst during the liberal experiment was con¬ 
ceived. It was not something to he acquired, 
but something to be set in motion. If you 
learned to think through for yourself a prob¬ 
lem in conduct, or statecraft, or art, or litera¬ 
ture, or student government, or athletic policy, 
you were more rightly to be considered on the 
way to become educated than if you had reeled 
off a dozen books of the Odyssey by heart. 
This system might involve you in awkward pre¬ 
dicaments. Your youngsters might organize a 
conscientious objection to compulsory chapel. 
They might voice opinions that shocked the 
daylights out of pre-Freudian parents, pre- 
Darwinian clergymen, and pre-Marxian alumni. 
But if you are afraid of barked shins you had 
better not climb the mountain. And it was, in 
those years, the Gentlemen Afraid of Barked 
Shins who complained the loudest that Amherst 
was teaching boys not what to think but how 
to think. 


m 


I N a society organized for cultural life every 
citizen would be allowed to feel himself a 
partaker in its creative purposes. In that form 
of society which we have, organized for acquir¬ 
ing and keeping—The Power State—the citizen 
is as a rule only made to feel himself a sharer 
in any common purpose when that purpose is 
destructive, when the authority of his Power 
State is affronted by some other Power State. 
He who would, under our present State, dedi¬ 
cate his talents to a creative career must 
do so on his own hook, and, so far from 
expecting any help from that state, count him¬ 
self lucky if its destructive enterprises do not 
thwart his creative ones. But the artist- 
thinker who realizes the horror of this plight 
knows that the only final escape is to teach the 
multitude to love the beauty that he loves. 

One saw all this in the shrewd test which the 
war period applied to the whole of us. Those 
who, in the confusion of this county-fair so- 
so 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


51 


ciety, had not as yet found any creative life- 
purpose, welcomed the war with a feeling of 
“At last, something worth doing!” Those 
whose lives had been absorbed in some larger 
than personal project met the war with a feel¬ 
ing of: “Why must we suffer this senseless in¬ 
terruption V’ 

During the vrar period Amherst college ren¬ 
dered into Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. 
It gave military instruction to a unit of the 
Reserve Officers Training Corps in 1917-18; 
and to a unit of the Student Army Training 
Corps in 1918-19. During the Salem witch¬ 
craft the only way to protect yourself from be¬ 
ing accused was to become an accuser. A cer¬ 
tain judicious tranquillity when everybody 
around you is shouting himself hoarse is in 
war-time evidence of treason. It later became 
a part of the standing case against the president 
of Amherst that during the years of 1917-18 he 
declined to park his brains. The proportion of 
intellect to warfare in the Amherst curriculum 
was forty-two hours a week for academic in¬ 
struction or study and eleven hours for military 
training. 


52 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


It was a stanza of the ballyhoo in those days 
that even when the war was over the colleges 
would have had such a salutary experience of 
military discipline as an improvement over 
their ordinary academic procedure that they 
would be glad to keep it; that they would rec¬ 
ognize the admission tests used by the army as 
far superior to their own; and that the voca¬ 
tional element in education would have so 
proved its worth that they would never be will¬ 
ing to return to the mere abstractions of liberal 
and cultural training. 

To see the president of Amherst quietly op¬ 
posing himself to this stampede, standing vir¬ 
tually alone, with the storms of passion howl¬ 
ing through that black night of reason, was 
immensely inspiriting. At the height of the 
war-fever, he delivered a chapel talk one morn¬ 
ing in which he said that physical courage was 
not to be considered as a virtue in itself; that 
it rose no higher than the cause in which it 
was enlisted. If enlisted for a noble end, then 
a virtue it could be. If enlisted for a low and 
squalid purpose, it was far from being virtuous 
or admirable. This of course was a scriptural 


PEOPHETS UNAWABES 


53 


“He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” If 
a boy had grasped the actual underlying causes 
of the war, it supported him in his independent 
thinking to a like course of action. If he be¬ 
lieved the war to be a crusade of ideals, it threw 
no cold water on his ardor. The talk‘did set 
going a lively buzz of discussion locally, but 
no hand was reached up to pluck down the 
speaker, perhaps because his thought was too 
well worded to expose any surface to a sniper’s 
bullet. 

Similarly, when the railroad companies in¬ 
quired whether they could rely on the students 
of Amherst for help in the threatened strike, 
they were told by the president of the college 
that if the State took over their railroad prop¬ 
erties and called on the students as citizens, 
they would respond like any other citizens, but 
the college saw no reason why it should take 
any notice of railroads as private companies. 
To the crude innocence with which those em¬ 
ployers assumed college men to be, in the very 
nature of things, understudies to the ruling 
class, this rebuke dealt bitter chagrin and did 
not endear the man who dealt it. 


54 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


There was a little one-line comedy enacted in 
a box of the Boston Opera House between acts 
of “Parsifal” which will serve as a compen¬ 
dious “Who’s Who” of thinkers in war-time. 
Encountering a prominent professor of phi¬ 
losophy who had become fired with martial ar¬ 
dor and was all for regimenting the entire in¬ 
tellect of the country, Mr. Meiklejohn remarked 
to him demurely: 

“This is a great time to study philosophy, 
isn’t it?” 

But even amid the din of those tom-tom 
years, the thought and action of the liberal ex¬ 
periment were going quietly forward. The de¬ 
cree that seven of the seventeen trustees be 
clergymen was removed from the charter. 
There was marked trend toward recognizing 
the independence of the faculty as a self- 
governing'body. You could see this as the pres¬ 
ident’s goal just so soon as he should have a 
faculty which could be relied on to self-govern 
itself into something besides a majority vote for 
sound repose. The new library building was 
so evolved out of a collaboration of those who 
were to use it as to be in plan a joint product of 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 55 

the college community, and it was especially de¬ 
signed to be an attractive place where the boys 
would enjoy working. The faculty personnel 
was being modified by a rule decreeing the re¬ 
tirement of teachers from active service at the 
age of sixty-five, and by another that no men 
below the grade of full professor should be re¬ 
garded as permanently engaged, but that in¬ 
structors were to be appointed year by year, 
and associate professors for periods not ex¬ 
ceeding three years. 

One of the stumbling-stools of go-as-you- 
please college administration has been a prac¬ 
tice similar to that of the seniority rules of 
United States Senate committees. If any old 
settler, irrespective of fitness, could hang on 
long enough to outlive his contemporaries, he 
became by right of age the head of the group. 
By 1918 the custom of regarding one member 
of a faculty department as its “head” had been 
abandoned at Amherst. There was no reason 
why one teacher should be allowed to dominate 
his fellows. And there are often a great many 
why he should not be. So in all but one or 
two cases Amherst abolished the ward boss of 


56 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


the intellect. The notion of a “ department ’ 9 
was likewise being relegated to the discard. In 
its place came a grouping into three divisions: 
the men teaching languages and literature in 
one; those teaching the humanistic studies in 
another; and those teaching the sciences in a 
third. There was also a preliminary rumble of 
the deprofessionalization of athletics. 

The vital test of an idea is whether it can 
keep on growing. Even in the drouth of the 
war period this idea of a liberal college made a 
growth which was sturdy and vigorous. Ad¬ 
vanced as the conception had been in 1912, it 
was even more advanced in 1918. By this time 
its author was no longer thinking in terms of 
courses required or elective. He had moved 
forward to an original and exhilarating project 
of the four-year course divided into two-year 
halves; the first a Junior College for freshmen 
and sophomores; the second a Senior College 
for juniors and seniors. The Junior College 
was to give the student an idea of the cultural 
material of his race; the Senior College was to 
set him to using it creatively himself. This 
idea was worked out with such elasticity of de- 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 57 

tail and leeway for adjustment in mid-process 
as to have made its adoption in some form vir¬ 
tually certain in time, had the Amherst experi¬ 
ment been allowed to go on. 

In the statement of this project occurred 
some sentences which contain the rumbling 
swash of breakers ahead: 

The reorganization proposed would have great 
effect upon our dealings with the members of the 
Faculty, those now with us as well as others to be 
appointed. For the trying of a high experiment 
we must have men of high ability and courage. 

Here was an avowed purpose of stiffening a 
pace already stiff. And here, I think, occurs 
one of the basic divisions on the issue of liber¬ 
alism. I have no doubt that plenty of excel¬ 
lent work was done at Amherst before the ad¬ 
vent of Mr. Meiklejohn. And among those 
who opposed him were men of ability, intellect, 
and character, who acted, I do not doubt, from 
good motives. The issue is, rather, one of the 
pioneering spirit. Plenty of estimable people 
prefer to dwell in the established settlements. 
It is only the adventurous who are all for press- 


58 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


ing on over the range and subduing the wilder¬ 
ness. When the enterprise, as at Amherst, is 
such as to become a question of the whole settle¬ 
ment’s having to pull up stakes and move for¬ 
ward through rough country and on over the 
range, men are forced to decide whether 
they are for marching on or staying still; 
and of course majorities are always in 
favor of remaining within gunshot of the 
stockade. 

And here, where the first of the collisions oc¬ 
curs, let us have a frank understanding. If 
this had been nothing more than an affair of in¬ 
stitutional loyalties I never would have taken 
any interest in it at all, let alone going to the 
trouble to write about it. 

Amherst College, as such, was, and is, no 
more to me than Hecuba. It became for a sea¬ 
son the vehicle of a great and living idea. I 
thought that idea a beautiful and glorious thing 
and loved it. Do not expect impartiality from 
a lover. I admired and respected everybody in 
Amherst who lived and worked for that idea. 
It seemed to me to irradiate the place and the 
people. It is probable that my whole view of 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 59 

the case is colored by this feeling. Yon had bet¬ 
ter allow for this all through. I shall try to be 
as fair as I can, but later in the story when 
things begin to get hot I may not make much 
of a go at it. But of this much you may he 
sure. There is not in me any tincture of per¬ 
sonal animosity toward any one connected with 
the controversy. Most of the opposition group 
were to me mythical beings who moved in 
Olympian cloud-disguises of college nicknames. 
Charles Lamb said you can’t hate a man you 
know. I may add that you can’t hate a man 
you don’t know. Of the two professors gener^ 
ally credited with the leadership of the oppo¬ 
sition, one was a man whose acquaintance I 
value and whose hospitality I have enjoyed, an 
interesting companion and a jovial soul; and the 
other I never so much as beheld in the flesh. I 
am writing with my mind fixed on the conflict of 
ideas, not of personalities. Where the person¬ 
alities come into conflict I shall try to speak 
with tolerance and courtesy or not at all. 
Where it is the ideas that come into conflict I 
shall lay about me with a right good will. Per¬ 
sonalities are of a day. An idea is of eternity. 


60 PROPHETS UNAWARES 

Institutions may be good ladders. They are 
poor wings. What would have happened to 
Emerson, Thoreau, or Walt Whitman had they 
tried to do their work through an institution? 
Emerson moved out of his institution at the 
first hint of coercion. Thoreau and Walt 
Whitman never moved in. Liberators must 
take to the open road. 

Now I see the secret of the making of the best 
persons, 

It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep 
with the earth. 

Here a great personal deed has room. . . 

The first thing that happens when a deed of lib¬ 
eration germinates inside the shell of an in¬ 
stitution is that the institution is cracked 
wide open. The larger question raised is 
whether the kind of thing which was at¬ 
tempted at Amherst can be achieved through 
an old and established organ, or indeed 
through any institution at all. It was a ques¬ 
tion continually uppermost in the minds of 
those who were attempting it. Even while you 
admired their pluck you were a prey to doubts 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


61 


whether the thing could he done that way. Mr. 
Meiklejohn himself cherished no illusions on 
the point. In his valedictory at the college 
gymnasium he said, “I am amazed that it 
lasted as long as it did . 9 ’ 

But meanwhile, for a glimpse of how sturdily 
the seed sprouts when it does fall into good 
ground, there is a modest little item of the war 
period which records “a gift of $250 from a 
young graduate, to be used in getting the fresh¬ 
men of this year more quickly aroused to intel-i 
lectual achievement.” 

Institutions are foot-hills. You may observe 
how they flatten into the plain as the climber 
mounts above the timber-line of conventional 
ideas. 

It was announced one day that Dr. Albert 
Parker Fitch had resigned the presidency of 
the Andover Theological Seminary at Cam¬ 
bridge to become professor of the history of re¬ 
ligion at Amherst College. The prevalent 
amazement at this act was a droll cartoon at 
the expense of our current standards of value. 
“A college president deliberately demote him- 


62 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


self to the rank of professor! Whatever can 
the man be thinking of ? ” The letters Fitch re¬ 
ceived, even from people who might have been 
supposed to know better, were a dish of satire. 
Their general tone was, “We can’t guess what 
it is that has happened, but be sure of this, old 
fellow: through thick and thin we stand by 
you.” 

To any one who knew what was going on at 
Amherst the act was perfectly intelligible. 
What had happened was one of the most nat¬ 
ural (and uncommon) things in the world. 
Fitch had had the native vitality of mind and 
the moral courage to vacate a supposedly loft¬ 
ier seat for a supposedly humbler one where he 
saw an opportunity to do what would be, for 
him, more genuine work. As president of An¬ 
dover Theological Seminary he enjoyed a con¬ 
siderable personal and official prestige. But 
much of that prestige was, to any sense of the 
realities, a mere fagade. Fitch is a real 
enough person to know reality when he sees it, 
and he saw it in # a professorship at Amherst un¬ 
der the liberal administration. He packed up 
his tool-kit and went. 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


63 


The college built him a frame dwelling down 
on South Common next to the black pine groves 
of Dour House. It was simple and beautiful 
with a dignity of white walls, flower-bordered 
brick walks, and fan-lighted doorway. He and 
his wife were virtually its architects, and they 
planned it for the generous use to which for the 
next six years it was put. Around its drawing¬ 
room hearth you encountered all sorts and con¬ 
ditions from scared freshmen to distinguished 
guests of the college. His study, like Ayres’s 
front steps next door, and a dozen other pri¬ 
vate dwellings of the faculty, was as much one 
of the college class-rooms as any in the recita¬ 
tion halls. Happening into it without appoint¬ 
ment you would find him sweating over Kant’s 
“Critique” with an advanced student, or lis¬ 
tening with patiently bland exterior and an in¬ 
ward twinkle of amusement to some ambitious 
sophomore reading his own verses. 

In the spring of 1920 the United States was 
none too congenial a place for a person of lib¬ 
eral leanings to live in. Unless one had a Bae¬ 
deker of his companions’ minds it was more 
prudent to confine one’s remarks to whether an 


64 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


egg should be fried on both sides or whether it 
was true that the Prince of Wales was engaged 
to wed Miss Polly Simp of Hollowhead, Long 
Island. Suppose you found yourself in for a 
month of convalesence. Where could you go 
and have rational conversation that would not 
be a game of hop-scotch to avoid treading on 
the toes of war and class hatreds? Where hut 
ninety miles up that one-ringed circus of a one- 
horse railway line to a small New England col¬ 
lege? In the world tumult of 1919-20 its enter¬ 
prise certainly looked minute enough. The 
idea of teaching five hundred boys how to use 
their heads for something besides hat-racks 
sounded, in those days, a good deal like talking 
eugenics in an age of wholesale and scientific 
human slaughter. But up there were moun¬ 
tains, a college library, and people whose con¬ 
versation was something besides a series of 
phonograph records which might be variously 
designated as the “Warwhoop Jazz” and the 
“ Bolshevik Blues.” 

The student body was back in civilians, but 
not the student mind. That odd mixture of 
restlessness and apathy which oppressed 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


65 


every one, but especially the young, in the 
months which followed the Armistice, had 
swept over the college. I suppose the cynical 
cunning of old men which uses alike the gener¬ 
ous and the pugnacious physical courage of 
young men to further its selfish purposes is one 
of the evils we must make up our minds to face 
as a contestant; but was anything in the whole 
grisly adventure more tragic than the spiritual 
exhaustion in which four million of our young 
men emerged from the war and which has gone 
far to give us for a rising generation four mil¬ 
lion young cynics ? Amherst had its share. A 
good many of the elder faculty members were 
heaping dust on their heads over the supposed 
immorality of the students. Whether the 
boys had, as they believed, along with the rest 
of youth the world over, gone on the loose did 
not appear. But even if they had, would it 
have been anything so very strange? When 
you have spent from two to four years teaching 
the youth of the Western world that hatred and 
violence are virtues, that murder is not only, as 
De Quincey would have it, to be considered as 
one of the fine arts, but one of the exact sciences 


66 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


and a civic duty to boot, can yon expect them, 
at the stroke of the bell, to sing “ Jesus, Merci¬ 
ful and Mild,” and troop back into Sunday- 
school like so many little lambs ? Can you now, 
honestly? 

But the supposed immorality of the students 
became the occasion of complaints to the 
alumni by those hostile to the liberal move¬ 
ment. The boys were represented as bound on 
a riotous Saturnalia of Borgian banquets, 
The accusation had to be met, and in meeting it 
the liberal idea blossomed anew, this time into 
an extension of the already flourishing student 
self-government which it had been one of the 
first acts of the liberal administration to foster. 
The Student Council, working with faculty 
committees, had virtual supervision of athlet¬ 
ics and of that extra-curriculum life of a college 
known as student activities. The students ad¬ 
ministered their own honor system, and the 
policing of examination rooms was a thing of 
the past. 

The flutter over college morals brought a 
comic interlude. There is a senior honorary 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


67 


society of much coveted membership known as 
Scarab. This sacred hug has no local habita¬ 
tion and holds no regular meetings. Member¬ 
ship chiefly signifies that you are, in some de¬ 
gree or other, It. Then a time came when 
Scarab was itself, as the children say, It. This 
bright idea occurred to the president. An an¬ 
nual festivity impended. It was important 
that nothing even seemingly unseemly take 
place that might be trumpeted forth by tale- 
mongers. So the president summoned Scarab 
to his study and asked it if it would kindly con¬ 
sent to assume responsibility for the conduct of 
the students for the event. Poor Scarab sat 
flabbergasted. It had never before had much 
of anything to do but look grand. After some 
consultation the holy beetle agreed to do as de¬ 
sired. What happened in the privacy of its 
sessions deponent knoweth not; but there was 
evidently some racing and chasing, for the re¬ 
sponsibility was accepted and discharged well. 
One incident only occurred to mar the perfect 
decorum of the feast. Just before its end, by 
some mishap or other, an otherwise blameless 


68 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


youth appeared on the floor in an advanced 
state of Nirvana. He was speedily shanghaied 
and afterward disciplined. 

But Scarab had had its fill of responsibility, 
and the burden was rapidly transferred to a 
more general student Committee of Seven. I 
was allowed to see the undertaking which this 
committee offered, and it was a document to 
heighten one’s respect for the quality of work 
done in the college, the quality of character 
evoked, and the quality of thinking which it 
bred. You saw in what a businesslike way 
these boys had gone at their task: no fuss, no 
feathers, no rhetoric, no gestures, no mouthing 
of pious aspirations. They did not promise 
more than they could hope to perform, and they 
did provide methods for performing what they 
promised. From that time forth the alumni 
Anvil Chorus chanted its stanzas of “The boys 
are going to hell” in decrescendo diminuendo. 

It was also about this time that the line of 
cleavage and conflict began to be distinctly 
drawn between youth and age. The younger 
alumni and undergraduates were in general en¬ 
thusiastic for the liberal administration; the 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


69 


elder graduates were in general increasingly 
"hostile. But at the same time it appeared how 
little youth is an affair of the body and how 
much it is an affair of the mind: there would 
be cases of an elderly and frozen mind in a 
young body and a young and liberal mind in an 
elderly body. As it does wherever it appears, 
this conflict between the past and the future 
split hearthstones. Fathers and sons would 
find themselves on opposite sides. 

But the idea, like an asparagus-bed, thiove 
under the knife. Up came its sprouts, here, 
there, somewhere else. It put forth a series of 
Amherst Books written by men of the faculty. 
It brought scholars and thinkers from Eng¬ 
land to lecture in Amherst, conservative, liberal 
or radical; Barker, Clay, and Tawney. It es¬ 
tablished workers ’ classes in the mill and in¬ 
dustrial cities of Holyoke and Springfield, 
taught by men of the Amherst faculty and man¬ 
aged in collaboration with the Central Labor- 
Unions—classes in economics, history, munici¬ 
pal government, and writing, well attended and 
fraught with as much instruction to the in¬ 
structors as to the instructed. It let whizz a 


70 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


stone from its sling at the Goliath of profes¬ 
sionalized college athletics, with a parallel of 
deadly irony between disarmament and the 
abolition of professional coaching: “I would 
be glad to scrap my dreadnaughts, but I don’t 
dare until the other fellow junks his.” It em¬ 
barked on an enterprise of educating its grad¬ 
uates tactfully designated as “A Plan for 
Alumni Reading and Study”—a plan intended, 
as Mr. Meiklejohn observed, to “mark the end 
of the day when men could talk of colleges as 
places of mere boyish association.” 

All these were parts of that conception which 
had grown out of the liberal experiment, the 
conception of a Greater Amherst, “a college 
touching and stimulating the minds of thou¬ 
sands instead of hundreds of men.” 

The predicament in which American colleges 
find themselves is that of the standards which 
prevail in the world of commerce whence they 
derive their support, spilling over on the altars 
of learning and threatening to put the fire out. 
Ten years after graduation your alumni are 
likely to come down on you in the form of gen¬ 
erous, jolly, loyal, and well-meaning armies of 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 71 

Philistia. Your college finds itself in the posi¬ 
tion of Mrs. Rnggles as her brood started off 
for Christmas dinner with the rich family: 

“I wouldn’t mind if folks would only say, 
‘children will be children.’ But they won’t. 
They’ll say: ‘Land o’ goodness! Who 
fetched up them young ones?’ ” 

It is not only the young ones that need fetch¬ 
ing up; it is even more the old ones. And Am¬ 
herst at least made a beginning. 

In all this blossoming one sees how naturally 
one petal unfolded out of another. The idea 
was infinitely telescopic, each lens being wider 
in diameter than the last. Student self- 
government and the devolution of responsibil¬ 
ity for their own doings led toward deprofes¬ 
sionalization of college athletics; and the resis¬ 
tance of alumni to this interference with their 
toy colosseums led to the endeavor to give 
them some tie with their college more appro¬ 
priate than post-touchdown chest expansion. 
It is not suggested that these measures are pat¬ 
terns for any and every college. What you 
have is an exemplification of how, once the vi¬ 
tal force starts flowing through a body and out 


72 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


into the life around it, that force can be relied 
on to create the needed member for the neces¬ 
sary act; an eye here, an ear there, a tongue, a 
hand, a foot. Given the idea, the deed comes of 
itself. And so we are back at our conception of 
life and education as a process . 

Of course this idea is not new. It is one of 
the oldest, if not the oldest, in the universe. 
Perhaps it is the universe itself. But it is one 
of those ideas which, because of its vitality, 
each generation has to learn for itself, which 
very few in each generation do seem to learn, 
but which it is of the utmost importance that as 
many learn as possible. 

Can it really be taught? Well, the fact that 
it exists and is important to learn can at least 
be taught, and that is more than happens in 
most institutions of learning as things are. 

And so the idea was prophetic. And those 
who served it were in some sort prophets. 
And so Amherst entertained its prophets una¬ 
wares. I am not suggesting that the prophets 
were unaware of their errand. Prophets 
never are. I am suggesting that the commu¬ 
nity at large was unaware of their being proph- 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


73 


ets. It always is. The life of the prophet is 
the only original detective story. He conies 
and he goes, disguised in his no-disguise, and 
neither his clients nor the police remotely sus¬ 
pect who he is until twenty minutes after he has 
gone. 


IV 


H ALF-WAY back in the hall I see several 
rows of young men and young women 
who have been listening thus far with respect¬ 
ful but amused attention. And this is what 
they are thinking: 

“Why all this tosh about college education? 
Haven’t things got vastly beyond any such 
consideration as that? What are colleges, 
what have they ever been, but creatures and 
bulwarks of a property system? In a time 
when the major struggle is over property, can 
we expect them to take sides against them¬ 
selves ? Here are we, who have had to pick up 
our education piecemeal, in snatched bites, be¬ 
tween turns at loom and work-bench. And pick 
it up we do. We know our Marx, our Darwin, 
our Nietzsche, our Freud, our Lenin, our Tol¬ 
stoy, our Engels, our Whitman, our Kropotkin, 
our Shaw, our Holland, our Carpenter, our An- 
atole France, our Emerson, our Thoreau, our 
74 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


75 


Henry George, onr Havelock Ellis, and several 
more. The list is a little mixed ? Never mind! 
We have a scheme of life that will give it unity 
enough. What is it? That is our business. 
Nothing like having a central purpose and that 
a revolutionary one, to turn all your reading 
into the good bone and gristle of experience. 
We are getting our education under difficulties, 
but we are getting it. As yet we may be only 
a handful. But we are the Prometheus of this 
profit-grinding society. Chain us to the crag 
though you may, we carry in us a secret which 
will one day be the overthrow of Zeus. As for 
these colleges, let them go on pseudo-educating 
the sons of the bourgeoisie, not one in ten of 
whom want an education or will ever use it. 
What does it all amount to but a ripple on a 
ground-swell? Can’t you find a better totem- 
pole to bow down to than college education? 
Why not try a cigar-store wooden Indian for a 
change ? 11 

In reply I would remark that, urgent as the 
present may be, some rather good work was 
done before the days of Marx and Darwin— 
some twenty-five or thirty centuries of it that 


76 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


we know of—and of this work the colleges, with 
all their faults, are in some sense the custo¬ 
dians. 

Away with totem-poles! Plenty of the best 
educated persons extant have never opened a 
book inside a college. It was a shrewd father 
who advised his son: “ Never get into an argu¬ 
ment with a man who pronounces words the 
way they are spelled. It means that he has 
thought things out for himself. ,, 

Education is like religion: if one does not 
want it no power on earth can give him the 
reality if it; and if one is determined to have it, 
no power on earth can withhold it from him. 
A college may be made a good whetstone for 
the steel of the mind. That the whetstone 
should be so generally mistaken for the blade is 
the predicament which called forth the liberal 
experiment we have been considering. 

And how can this rude bridge of cultural 
training, which may have arched the flood of in¬ 
tellectual life well enough a century ago, be ex¬ 
pected to span the maelstroms of to-day? 

Perhaps it cannot. But it may serve as the 
working model of something that can. For it 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


77 


next begins to appear that the Idea which was 
at work in Amherst had a bearing on one of the 
major difficulties of modern society; and when 
its author remarked, to the scandal of some, 
that America has hardly embarked on the en¬ 
terprise of public education which is necessary 
to make a democracy, he had meshed his exper¬ 
iment with the vast and as yet unwieldy ma¬ 
chine of Public Opinion. 

When our prairie-schooner of political de¬ 
mocracy set sail on its transcontinental voyage, 
it was freighted with one article of cargo that 
was novel and daring: public schooling. It is 
possible that a grammar-school training may 
have been sufficient a century ago to equip the 
electorate of a predominantly agrarian society 
for the management of its political machinery. 
But no sooner was this instituted than the in¬ 
vention of nineteenth-century industrial ma¬ 
chinery threw it out of gear. And we now pre¬ 
sent the spectacle of a factory nation endeavor¬ 
ing to behave as though a political system based 
on agricultural production with territorial rep¬ 
resentation and popular education of the coun¬ 
try school-house and grammer-grade type still 


78 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


answered our purposes. They may answer the 
purposes of commercial exploitation by the few 
of the many, but they do not answer the pur¬ 
poses for which this republic was founded. 

The result is a growing consternation over 
what we flatter by the name of Public Opinion. 
In theory, and in the supposition of many, we 
are governed by it. In practice we are gov¬ 
erned by something vastly different. What we 
have is a huge population of grammar-schooled 
newspaper readers with no general ideas be¬ 
yond conventional ones of religion and patriot¬ 
ism (and latterly a religion of patriotism) fed 
on news despatches which need a highly criti¬ 
cal reading which they are unprepared to give, 
if they give anything but the want-columns and 
sporting-pages any reading at all; and this in 
an age and a civilization so complex that only 
by the widest diffusion of the keenest intelli¬ 
gence does it seem possible for a democracy to 
survive as a democracy at all. 

Public Opinion, therefore, in the sense of ca¬ 
pacity for intelligent self-government, can 
hardly be said to exist. It would be more ac¬ 
curate to speak of Public Emotion. The thing 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


79 


we designate as Public Opinion is hardly up to 
the task of municipal government, let alone in¬ 
ternational. When a so-called democratic gov¬ 
ernment finds itself in a position where it is nec¬ 
essary for the ruling class to seem to be gov¬ 
erning in obedience to the popular will, what 
happens is that Public Emotion is worked up 
by systematic processes of publicity, and told 
what to tell the government to do. This is un¬ 
satisfactory. 

It is continually a question with young 
middle-class liberals what they can do of most 
practical use to society. One thing they can 
do, in speech, in print, in picture, in drama, in 
public and private life, is to simplify, for minds 
of a texture just as good as their own, only less 
disciplined, the enormously complicated masses 
of fact-material which Public Opinion needs to 
assimilate before it can be capable of intelli¬ 
gent action. There is any quantity of this 
work to be done as a voluntary contribution 
over and above the earning of one’s livelihood 
in the underpaid professions of public-school 
teaching, the ministry, journalism—the pro¬ 
fession may be what it will; the will to serve in 


80 PROPHETS UNAWARES 

this kind can be relied on to create its instru¬ 
ment. 

The immediate task is one of simplification. 
And yet when these complicated issues of state¬ 
craft and economics have been simplified you 
still experience an all-gone feeling to find your¬ 
self talking postgraduate material to grammar- 
school minds. They are minds of adult tex¬ 
ture, to be sure, and many of them life itself 
has schooled to an education far higher and 
truer than any to be had in a college. But 
these are not the average. What is the aver¬ 
age? A well nigh unavoidable preoccupation 
with personal concerns, plus a miscellany of 
moral instincts, casual information, inherited 
prejudices, class superstitions, and—above all, 
and a matter of infinite hope—a wealth of gen¬ 
erous impulses. The materials are as good as 
need be. The making is all that we lack. 

But politics is at present the art of appeal¬ 
ing to emotion. As between two candidates, 
one who appealed to emotion, and another who 
appealed to reason, which, for victor, would be 
the safer bet? An emotion may be good as 
well as bad. But the lower ones are notori- 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


81 


ously easier to excite, and are consequently the 
ones most frequently appealed to. But even 
the best emotions, falsely instructed, can be 
mustered for the worst causes. Before politics 
can be anything more than a game of playing 
off one set of emotions against another, a world 
of instruction will have to be instituted. And 
those whose labor brings them most in contact 
with this erratic force in our public affairs find 
it at present of little more value than a barom¬ 
eter in a hurricane. It tells you how bad the 
storm is, and that is about all. 

Our public opinion is therefore about where 
the institution of political democracy in an 
agrarian society established it a century ago: 
at the grammar-school age. It is, in a word, 
adolescent. It has the faults of adolescence, 
and also the virtues. It is immature and im¬ 
pulsive. It is also quick to learn and instinc¬ 
tively generous. It needs educating and needs 
it badly. Unless it is educated, that which we 
still have of democracy will go the way it is al¬ 
ready headed: for empire and trouble. 

We have decreed that our children go to 
school up to the age of fourteen or sixteen. 


82 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


But why stop there ? If that intelligent elector¬ 
ate necessary to maintain an eighteenth- 
century agrarian political democracy required 
the trouble and expense of schooling us up 
through the grammar grades, why should not 
a twentieth-century of machine industry send 
us to school in some sort or other until we are 
twenty, or thirty, or forty if need be to create 
that level of public intelligence necessary for 
the functioning of democratic government 
through the new and complex forms of eco¬ 
nomic life? Too expensive? Nine tenths of 
our public money goes, as things are, to pay for 
enterprises of human slaughter past or future. 
Mass-murders, be it noted, most of which could 
have been avoided had the level of intelligence 
among the many been equal to that of the few. 
Impracticable in our present organization of 
life? Dislocation of industry? Barriers of 
poverty? Of low intelligence? Of unwilling¬ 
ness to learn? Impossible short of a complete 
reconstruction of our social system? Well, 
does any one who has given the matter serious 
study suggest that our social system needs any¬ 
thing so much as a complete reconstruction? 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 83 

If it is necessary to school factory hands up 
to the estate of postgraduate instruction at the 
expense of the public and the inconvenience of 
the employer; to reorganize agrarian and ma¬ 
chine production on a cooperative basis; to 
make the moving-picture film serve some pur¬ 
pose more than sex stimulation, and the news¬ 
paper to shorten its ration of scandal, murder, 
and sudden death to the admission of sober but 
by no means necessarily dull data requisite for 
public instruction in matters of economics, 
politics, statecraft, and hygiene fraught with 
the well-being of all; if it is necessary to ran¬ 
sack the arsenal of human ingenuity for devices 
to make learning not only accessible but attrac¬ 
tive; to make in the life of every citizen the 
requisite adjustments of earning-time to 
learning-time and of earning-power to 
learning-power; to employ our thus decreed 
margins of leisure for something more profit¬ 
able than the prevalent tedious devices for 
time-killing, let us reflect that the probable al¬ 
ternatives to these efforts may be less agree¬ 
able. 

Public schooling is a policy to which we as a 


84 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


nation are already committed and have been 
from the start. If a vigorous extension of it 
is necessary not only to bring our scheme of 
democratic life up to date with itself but also 
to save us from going the way Rome went, why 
stickle over it? 

Such a project would meet with frantic re¬ 
sistance? It would. And that resistance 
might teach us who was resisting and why. 
That alone would be a liberal education for 
some. 

There would be a desperate struggle for con¬ 
trol of the material which went to form the cur¬ 
riculum in this university of adult education? 
There would. And so we are back to our idea 
of education, not as a sponge-like soaking-in of 
indiscriminate facts, but as a process of 
thought. Suppose this conception of education 
as a free play of intelligence over any given 
problem, as a spirit of impartial scrutiny, an 
attitude of questioning, and a will to create, 
were to become established as our standard. 
Interested parties might then feed minds thus 
awakened howsoever adulterated materials 
they would; such minds might nevertheless be 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 85 

able to detect the adulteration and sunder the 
false from the true. 

And so it may appear why the adventure 
which was started in that little college town 
among the Massachusetts hills had a value out 
of all proportion to its seeming insignificance of 
size. It was one of those inspired guesses the 
end of which no man can tell. And so when, 
at the end of his address on “Democracy and 
Excellence, ’ y Mr. Meiklejohn declared that our 
task of the future is one of education and that 
for this we have as yet hardly so much as 
erected the scaffolding, it was no mere pro¬ 
nouncement of the shoemaker who thinks there 
is nothing like leather. Out of that rude 
bridge of cultural training which arched the 
flood of intellectual life a century ago, this idea 
of a liberal education may yet fashion a struc¬ 
ture which will prove a span from the past to 
the future. 


V 


T HE only way to appreciate what life in 
Amherst was in those years amid that 
society of scholars and thinkers was to go there 
and live. And so, if any one cares for nature, 
for learning, for excellence, for genial and 
meaty social interchange, for youth bound on 
high errands, for plain living and high think¬ 
ing, let him come along. 

We are in a gracious old New England town 
which bestrides a low ridge amid the grass- 
green meadows and earth-brown tillage of the 
Connecticut Valley, all in a wide amphitheat- 
rical howl of mountain ranges. The moun¬ 
tains are Hellenic. That is to say, they are just 
about the right height to climb in a Sunday 
forenoon of golden sunshine, “ discoursing of 
divine philosophy” as you go. 

Let it be the month of May. The streets of 
the town are cathedral naves of overarching 
elms. Door-yards are gardens of flowering* 
86 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


87 


shrubs—the snowy bridal-wreath, the pink wei- 
gela, the flowering almond, the Japanese quince 
spurting its jets of scarlet flame, the purple li¬ 
lacs, the waxen syringa. Wrens warble. In a 
field near by bobolinks are giving cantatas with 
an orchestration of sun and sky. Up from the 
dewy turf comes the smell of good green grass, 
and the wind is sweet with all the breath of 
May. Across the deep green wooded slopes of 
the mountain ranges move the dark blue 
shadow patterns of the clouds, white-robed 
ministrants in that ceremonial procession 
which treads the torquoise pavement of the 
heavens. The smooth-shaven turf of the town 
common is all a scutcheoning of green and gold. 
And across it is an academic vista of red-brick 
walls and Ionic columns with elm-boughs 
drooping pendulous beside their flutings and 
volutes: Hellas in New England. 

A bell rings. Bare-headed, coatless youths 
in knickerbockers and white tennis shirts troop 
this way and that to breakfast. It rings again. 
They climb the college hill to that half-ironic 
architectural blend of New England meeting¬ 
house and Greek temple which our co-derived 


88 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


Hebraic and Hellenic culture so innocently 
builds for its seats of worship—in this case the 
college chapel. All day long they come and go, 
and among them is a group of professors with 
whom you can stop and chat quite casually of 
something more profitable than whether Bull¬ 
frog Preferred is off three points or how many 
miles of wear can be got out of Supersupe tires. 
It was in one of these curbstone sessions that 
I first learned from Professor Manthey-Zorn 
that there was such a thing as the Youth Move¬ 
ment in Germany. There is also and in espe¬ 
cial a mellow old scholar, biologist by profes¬ 
sion, Hellenist by nature, and Christian by soul 
and conduct, named John Tyler. I have in 
mind a certain afternoon in May when he in¬ 
vited me to a seat beside him on the curbing, 
and there we sat for an hour or more, feet in 
gutter, the teacher and the taught, oblivious to 
everything except the one subject which really 
matters: religion. When I think of Professor 
Tyler I think that it raises the whole tone of 
life just to know that there are such people in 
the world. And when I remember that Profes¬ 
sor Tyler is of that elder Amherst which was 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


89 


before the days of the liberal experiment, I am 
by no means so certain that experiment was 
the be-all and end-all that one is prone to sup¬ 
pose. 

What is there in all this so very different 
from the life of any college town? Nothing, 
perhaps, that you would notice much at first. 
It is with some amusement and chagrin that I 
think how long it was in registering its impres¬ 
sion on me. But sit at breakfast in a student 
boarding-house morning after morning, or 
lounge on the terrace of one of those too sump¬ 
tuous fraternity-houses, and listen, not too 
sharply, to the cheerful babble of conversation. 
Gradually it begins to be borne in on you that 
something has happened. In fact, several 
things. Can it be that the business of study 
is here being taken seriously? Some grum¬ 
bling of course there is. But gone is that tone 
which haunts so many colleges, that tone of 
the apologetic-jocular adopted out of a feel¬ 
ing that intellectual enthusiasms are socially 
not good form; that if cherished they should be 
concealed, just as a gentleman should conceal 
any other irregularity of conduct. Something 


90 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


has here wrought the miracle of making scholar¬ 
ship respectable. Next yon gather that there 
is some pride and pleasure in the studies for 
their own sakes. Again, somehow somebody 
has made at least a part of these youngsters 
feel the delight of hard intellectual labor. You 
may hear them babbling interestedly among 
themselves about their studies without a taint 
of intellectual snobbery and certainly with no 
consciousness of talking for an audience. They 
are just boys whole-heartedly interested in 
something and rather surprised and tickled 
to discover that this something which they had 
always been led to suppose was a bore and a 
chore is, on the contrary, any quantity of fun. 
Then something else begins to appear. As of¬ 
ten as the talk veers to economics, politics, or 
sociology you become aware that these boys, 
whether they know it or not, are speaking the 
modern language of liberal thought. They are 
not astonished and shocked at the suggestion 
that something has happened since 1830. They 
are using terms and discussing questions which 
their fathers and uncles, even their elder broth¬ 
ers, can hardly mention without getting heated 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


91 


in the head, choleric in the liver, and calling in 
the vocabulary of tirade. What terms, what 
questions? The wage-system, the class-strug¬ 
gle; occupational representation, imperialism, 
unemployment, shop control, strikes, lockouts, 
boycotts, profit-sharing. . . . All of which, to 
the minds of these lads, are matters not to get 
angry over but to study. 

When this state of things finally penetrated 
my consciousness, it suddenly occurred to me: 

“Suppose these boys go home, as go they 
must, into the bosoms of average middle- and 
upper-class families—households whose politi¬ 
cal and economic notions are formed by the 
necessarily one-sided representations of the 
capitalist press, or derived from a political sys¬ 
tem set up on a basis of agricultural life years 
before the advent of machine industry. Sup¬ 
pose these boys talk, as talk they must, temper¬ 
ately, as they are now, about matters which 
their parents think it high treason to mention 
in any accents but those of abhorrence. What 
wonder if those parents throw double-Arab 
somersaults of amazement and alarm? What 
wonder if they think the college has launched 


92 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


their sons on the greased skids of a toboggan 
slide to the Everlasting Bonfire? It is too bad 
that the odds against this needful and gallant 
enterprise should be so heavy. But what can 
you expect? In an age of passion the unpar¬ 
donable offense is to teach youth to reason. 
How much longer can this go on?” 

Now, it is a mistake to suppose that hostility 
to this kind of enterprise is wholly conscious; 
but it is equally a mistake to suppose that peo¬ 
ple unacquainted with ideas are therefore un¬ 
aware of their presence. The human mind has 
feelers, and these antennae of instinct are pe¬ 
culiarly sensitive in those who in the realm of 
thought live chiefly by instinct. Bring them 
into the neighborhood of an advanced idea, and 
while they don’t know what it is that they don’t 
like, they do know that they don’t like it. It 
is bristle and growl at the sensed presence of 
spooks. To attack an institution for the pro¬ 
mulgation of ideas because it promulgates ideas 
we do not like puts us at a disadvantage. Con¬ 
sciously or unconsciously, everybody will grasp 
that. So the dislike takes the form of looking 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


93 


for faults. I dare say there were in the liberal 
administration plenty of faults to find. If it 
were n’ta post-funereal body-snatching I could 
mention a few myself. I see no reason to sup¬ 
pose that the trustees were anything but sin¬ 
cere and high-minded gentlemen performing 
what they felt to be a duty which, however pain¬ 
ful, had become an absolute necessity for the 
good of the college. Testimony has been laid 
before me which makes me feel that judged by 
the prevailing standards of our land and time 
the trustees felt themselves to be acting only 
as they were bound to act in the discharge of 
their trust; that is, as men held responsible for 
the body of an institution rather than its soul 
(if an institution can have a soul); responsible 
for its property rather than for the spirit in 
which that property is used. But faults 
aplenty though there no doubt were, the ques¬ 
tion is whether those faults would ever have 
been taken so seriously as to be made the oc¬ 
casion of terminating the liberal experiment 
had there not been on the trustees the steady 
pressure of this vast and only half-conscious 


94 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


body of suspicion and alarm at the kind of 
ideas which the freedom of inquiry in the col¬ 
lege tended to promulgate. 

And I have been at pains to describe this 
process not because it is peculiar to Amherst 
but because it is not. It is the process every¬ 
where operative in the struggle between the 
new and the old. The new comes along. It 
threatens to disturb routine. We don’t know 
what is is that we don’t like, but we do know 
that we don’t like it. We base our objections 
not on that dislike but on some incidental 
fault. This is the way of all flesh. And no 
one is guiltless. We all do it. 

May I therefore, in all courtesy, go on to say 
that the kind of objection to the liberal regime 
which went the rounds was, so far as it came 
to my ears, mainly of this sort. Meet it here, 
and it broke out there. 

. . . The boys were growing immoral.—No? 
Well, then they were drinking too much.—No? 
Well, then they were irreligious.—No? Well, 
then they were getting bookish and losing too 
many games.—No? Well, then something else 1 
The Anvil Chorus was like nothing so much as 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


95 


those Russian symphonists who send the same 
tune round and round their orchestra in end¬ 
less variations of instrumental timbre, but the 
same tune it remains. Were this nothing more 
than an affair of an academic parish stir, it 
would not be worth reciting. But like so much 
else in the Amherst episode it is symptomatic 
of our whole modern situation and opens the 
doors of question in all directions. What is 
it that makes one stripe of mind friendly to ex¬ 
periment, and another hostile to it! Does this 
quality lie deeper than any education? Is it 
inborn, or can it be inculcated? Had the elder 
type of college education been of another tem¬ 
per, would there have been as much difficulty 
in getting a longer and more patient hearing 
for the new? Or was that elder type quite 
good enough, and are we only suffering from 
the corrosive mediocrity of the prevailing 
standards of American life? Or is contempo¬ 
rary American life no more mediocre than the 
run of existence in any age and perhaps vastly 
superior to most? Are those who care and 
struggle for excellence always necessarily a 
minority who must expect and cheerfully accept 


96 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


the inertia if not the resistance of the majority? 
Or is the impatience and singleness of aim of 
these very lovers of excellence in one kind their 
worst and only enemy? Or is the scale of life 
so huge that all of us, in one and the same per¬ 
son, must find ourselves now on the creative 
side of one enterprise and now on the inert or 
negative side as against another equally crea¬ 
tive? In all humility it occurs to me that 
plenty of the faculty, alumni, and trustees who 
finally terminated the experiment are men of 
devoted lives, working quite as hard for the 
enrichment of human existence in their own 
fields as Mr. Meiklejohn and his group of lib¬ 
erals were working in theirs, and only pre¬ 
vented from seeing and understanding and 
sympathizing with it to the full and utmost 
term of fruition by that “ certain blindness in 
human beings ’ * so acutely observed by William 
James—a blindness which comes less from hu¬ 
man callousness than from human finitude. 
When I think of some of the excellent men of 
the Amherst faculty who could not “see” the 
liberal administration, at least not to a final 
and last-ditch support of it, men whose friend- 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


97 


ship any rational being would be glad to claim, 
I am constrained to believe that our human 
race has come to a point where it must begin 
to cultivate some sixth sense, some fourth¬ 
dimensional consciousness, as much beyond our 
merely intellectual processes as our intellec¬ 
tual processes are beyond our merely physical 
ones; for only so does it seem possible to avoid 
these tragic clashes of understanding in which 
the finer organisms of thought are destroyed 
and all of us left the poorer. And I suspect 
that it was, in truth, some such expansion of 
consciousness into a larger and higher rhythm 
of being which explains that extraordinary 
final scene at the gymnasium. 

Remote as this Arcadia of blossoming or¬ 
chards and college walls might seem from the 
world issues of class-war and imperialism, it 
was the one academic town known to me where 
you could feel the least cloistered. Indeed, a 
good dozen of its faculty were, in one way or 
another, in the thick of the fray. Professor 
Cobb, whose subject is mathematics, spent two 
days a week adjusting wage disputes in Roches- 


98 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


ter, New York. Stacy May was suspected of 
taking his workers’ classes in Springfield and 
Holyoke more seriously than his classes of col¬ 
lege men, though he had a happy knack of 
making the latter take their own tasks seriously, 
especially when he pronounced some of those 
youngsters’ research so good that he proposed 
to incorporate it into his own published work. 
Professors Hamilton and Stewart of the eco¬ 
nomics department had numerous irons in 
outside fires. The Fundamentalist heretic- 
hunters were gunning for Dr. Fitch to his infi¬ 
nite amusement, as he went preaching up and 
down the land. To drop in for an hour’s chat 
with Ayres, Hamilton, Stewart, or half a dozen 
others was to come away with a more lucid idea 
of where we are in this besetting social muddle 
of ours than you could have gathered from one 
in a hundred so-called men of affairs. Stark 
Young was giving the boys such a lively en¬ 
thusiasm for literature as I know of few other 
college instructors’ doing unless it be Professor 
Copeland of Harvard, and so informal was the 
instruction that boys of the type least likely to 
presume on personal acquaintance spoke of 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 99 

him as Stark. (Young, true to form as a re¬ 
viewer of plays, left the theater before the be¬ 
ginning of the fifth act; but like the gentleman 
in the ancient Greek inscription, he was one 
“whom friends remembered with affectionate 
regret. ,, ) Everett Glass was putting the dra¬ 
matic club through the paces of old comedy 
and new with a proficiency which was steadily 
approaching professional standards. It was a 
question if Ayres did not teach as much philoso¬ 
phy out of curriculum hours as in. Gaunt and 
baronial as the builder of Dour House had de¬ 
signed it to be, this genial (and somewhat 
youthful) philosopher lived in it with a sim¬ 
plicity and openness of hearth which befit the 
sage; and if you grew tired of philosophizing 
you could sit beside his white marble fireplace 
in front of a cheerful blaze of logs and listen 
to sonatas of Beethoven played, as they should 
be played, by a philosopher-pianist. Laurence 
Saunders was handling his history courses with 
vigor and originality. Howard Hinners had 
come back from Paris prepared to do for music 
at Amherst what Dr. Davison has done for it 
at Harvard, and had already made a good be- 


100 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


ginning with the college choir. There were usu¬ 
ally two or three of his chanting cherubs hov¬ 
ering behind his organ-bench when he thun¬ 
dered out fugues of Bach while their fellows 
filed out of church or chapel. Walter Agard 
came back from Oxford, Athens, and pedestrian 
tours among the mountains and monasteries of 
Greece as ardent a Hellenist as you could wish, 
plus a special enthusiasm for the plastic 
arts. To this group add George Scatchard, 
one of those quiet young men who embrace the 
unspectacular career of hard work, incommen¬ 
surate rewards, and popular indifference which 
go with a life dedicated to scientific research; 
and a robust young charioteer of college teams 
named Allison Marsh, who was, all unbe¬ 
knownst to himself, a figure indicative of what 
the college athletic coach of the future will 
probably be—an associate professor in the in¬ 
stitution, a scholar, an athlete, a careful stu¬ 
dent of his profession with its human material, 
and one of those personalities for which peo¬ 
ple, in despair of defining them, fall back on 
the expression “salt of the earth .’’ 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


101 


These and, be it added, other men, not only 
those who were friendly but several who were 
hostile to the liberal administration, made Am¬ 
herst in those years a refuge from the bla- 
tancy, the suburbinanity, the family-centric and 
office-centric universes of American middle- 
class Plutopolis and Respectaburbia. There 
was in this valley of the Connecticut, snow blue 
in winter and green golden in summer, a new 
flowering as of the Periclean Age, a tender 
sprout pushing bravely up in some January 
thaw of time from that vast, deep-buried, and 
undying root system of Hellenic culture. Here, 
with at least a semblance of leisure, with learn¬ 
ing, with youth, with mountain scenery, was a 
wee foretaste of one of those utopias for which 
the whole world goes homesick. And it was a 
utopia which, so far from being a fire-escape 
from reality, had resolutely set about shoulder¬ 
ing its share of leading the exodus from that 
land of bondage to which it was, in some meas¬ 
ure, a land of promise. Here, for once, was 
some union of Democracy and Excellence; and 
when I went across the Holyoke range to hear 


102 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


Mr. Meiklejohn deliver his address on that 
theme to the graduating class of Mount Hol¬ 
yoke College, I could not help thinking: 

“Democracy and Excellence? Well, what is 
that but what you yourself have gone a long 
way to establish in Amherst College V 9 

The truth is, and it may‘be confessed with 
some amusement, I was at pains to stay away 
from the place for all except about one month 
a year, from a feeling that, after all, my job 
as a journalist was with a world of sinking 
ships and praying hands, and that, for me at 
least, too much utopia might prove a lethal 
chamber to the sense of all this tragic need 
around us. The idea was to drink just enough 
of that utopian brew as would serve to keep out 
the weather without making you feel like tak¬ 
ing a nap in a snow-drift. 

But it was far from being a lethal chamber 
to the young men who lived and studied there. 
Not every college senior is a prophet in the 
making. But in each class there would be a 
group of keen and energetic young men—schol¬ 
ars, athletes, and thinkers—far better equipped 
to cope with their responsibilities as citizens 


PEOPHETS UNAWARES 


103 


of a republic and far better informed of 
what those responsibilities are than are most 
college graduates. Year by year the college 
knew and delighted to honor them by the dozen 
and the score, and so, I think, in time, will the 
world. 

Perhaps it was lucky, after all, that this life 
of such distinction went on, as such a life usu¬ 
ally does, with little or no notice being taken of 
it; for it was thus preserved in that first con-, 
dition of excellence, a charming and total ab¬ 
sence of self-consciousness. One evening I 
happened into the president’s house to find 
Otto Glaser, Stone professor of biology, trussed 
up in valid-wise on a sofa playing penuchle or 
something with Mr. Meiklejohn’s little boys. 
It appeared that he had been laid up with an 
attack of rheumatism which forbade walking, 
and, there being no wheel-chair short of the 
college hospital, the president had taken his 
son Donald’s express-cart and hauled the 
Stone professor of biology up the street to the 
official residence, in serene indifference to its 
seeming fulfilment of an election bet; and here 
was the professor amusing three solemn little 


104 PROPHETS UNAWARES 

boys and being amused by them, and everybody 
happy. 

It occurred to me to wonder in how many 
college towns, of the Atlantic seaboard at least, 
could be found a prases and professor so little 
impressed with their own social altitude and so 
little regardful of the starched formalism of 
polite society. 

But in all this symposium the choisest vin¬ 
tage was that decanted in hours with the head 
of the college. These were neither very many 
nor very frequent. You felt guilty about tak¬ 
ing much of his time, ungrudgingly as he gave 
it. Once in a while of a morning, after col¬ 
lege chapel, it was permissible to walk home 
with him for a cup of coffee and a season of 
conversation in the study. Then was solid 
satisfaction. Here was a man spacious enough 
to measure the tonnage of life without refer¬ 
ence to any Plimsoll mark of external displace¬ 
ment: a simple, sincere human being, won- 
drously wise and wondrously sweet-tempered. 
The profit of conversation increases directly 
in proportion to the breadth and depth of the 


PEOPHETS UNAWAEES 105 

things which, between the speakers, can be 
taken for granted. Yon may take the measure 
of your man by the number of dangerous top¬ 
ics you feel obliged to avoid. With this man 
you had a feeling that there were no dangerous 
topics. ‘ 1 Mein Eeich ist in der Luft. ’ ’ It was 
like admission to the breathing of a larger air. 
One could see why these young men felt toward 
him the way they did: he had the power of 
liberating minds. 

It was in 1920. He said that remaking the 
college had been an uphill struggle: 

“It was just getting a fair start when the 
war came to us; it could do little more than 
hang on last year; it is just squeaking through 
now . 9 9 

He said that he did not in the least blame 
those who were opposing him: 

‘ ‘ They see an institution which they had come 
to look upon as something between pet and 
plaything in a way to be taken from them. ,, 

He was even aware of the perils of victory: 

“I wonder if an organism formed under the 
conditions of struggle can prosper when those 
conditions of struggle are removed .’ 9 


106 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


Fatigue was written all over him ... He 
praised the work of various professors—nota¬ 
bly Hamilton, Stewart, and Fitch. 

“ Fitch,’’ he said, “has worked himself nearly 
ill. Hamilton’s influence in the college is es¬ 
pecially strong. But you heard Stewart’s talk 
to the seniors at chapel.” 

I had. And to hear it was to realize the 
spirit of power and purpose that was permeat¬ 
ing this institution. It was the seniors’ fare¬ 
well appearance at chapel. The speaker (then 
unknown to me) had begun by announcing that 
he was going to talk about college spirit. (One 
groaned inwardly.) He began. After half a 
dozen sentences you began to wake up. Here 
was none of the usual banality, addressed to the 
usual juvenility, known as college spirit; this 
was the language of a man to men, of an in¬ 
tellect to intellects; here was a college spirit 
larger than this or any other institution, a col¬ 
lege with a spirit that is universal. 

One of the engaging turn-abouts in conversa¬ 
tion with this prceses was that, coming to quiz, 
you found yourself quizzed—a man less given 
to speech than question. 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


107 


“Do you think,’’ he asked, “that the fact- 
material on both sides of a public issue could 
be impartially presented to the masses of peo¬ 
ple, there would be any doubt of their respond¬ 
ing to the right side?” 

“No. But with the control of the machinery 
of publicity so in the hands of the propertied 
classes, how can there be any impartial pre¬ 
sentation of fact-material?” 

He smiled and was silent. But for a time, in 
what may seem a small way, there was a body 
of five hundred young men who, at the price 
of manful effort and infinite patience, did have 
a chance to examine the fact-material of mod¬ 
ern life impartially presented for unbiased 
judgment. 

The experiment might be succeeding, but it 
was evidently against odds which were making 
it cost heavily in its author’s strength. He 
looked worn to brightness, like a coin much in 
demand. His voice and expression were those 
of one accustomed to keep his temper, even his 
sweetness, under extreme provocation. In his 
shiny blue serge suit—except his academic 
robes on occasion, he never seemed to wear any 


108 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


other—tired, thin, but resolutely pleasant, I 
could not but contrast him with the brisk, 
bright, yes, the young man, of only six years 
before. And I thought: 

“There is something about this man—frail, 
fatigued, unembittered—that is heroic. And 
to think that he should be cordially hated! 
What a crazy-quilt world it is.” 

Three years later, in a passage from that 
final baccalaureate which he delivered from the 
pulpit of the college church, I gained a glimpse 
of the possible answer to this riddle. It was 
that in so far as men overprize, as most of us 
do> the possessions of this world—the things 
which can be bought and sold and hoarded and 
handled—are they disfranchised from prizing 
or even comprehending the things of the spirit. 
Though one rose from the dead, yet would they 
not believe. Or the liberator has, like Crom¬ 
well, a wart on his nose which to their vision 
obscures his every virtue. “ ‘My kingdom is 
not of this tvorld ” Thus quoted the preacher 
of that baccalaureate. “We have asked, ‘In 
what sense is our world Christian V And 
Jesus seems to answer, ‘In no sense at all.* 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


109 


Christianity is not a theory by which the world 
lives. It is a criticism of this world and its 
theories; it is a condemnation both of civiliza¬ 
tion and of the men who make it. ,, 

Suppose an educational experiment travels so 
far on its errand of truth-seeking as to become, 
for the minds of scores of young men, an ex¬ 
posure of our existing social system, and an 
exposure so thorough that they begin to arrive, 
like Jesus, at the condemnation both of our 
civilization and of the men who make it. What 
if that educational experiment were, here and 
there, with increasing frequency, producing 
young men who, along with the cultivated 
minds and disciplined bodies of young Greeks, 
had also, in a high tine sense, the spirit of 
Christians? the will to excel, and along with 
it, the will to share? Given a vast external 
majority whose kingdom is emphatically of this 
world, who can hardly conceive of any other, 
and who are so far from condemning this civili¬ 
zation of ours or the men who make it as to 
cling to it desperately, and what could you ex¬ 
pect? I am reminded of the conscientious ob¬ 
jectors who were committed to the observation 


110 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


ward. In a lunatic age the sane man is sent 
to the psychopathic. In an age of unfaith the 
believer will be known as an infidel. In an age 
of materialists the man of thought will be de¬ 
rided as unable to administer property. In an 
age of hate and fear the prophet of good will 
and free intelligence will be howled down as 
a traitor. This riot of paradox is generated by 
two forms of life going forward on our planet 
at one and the same time. To the eye of the 
flesh the two are indistinguishable. To the eye 
of the spirit the only difference between them 
is that one regards the things which can be 
bought and sold and hoarded and handled as 
valuable in themselves; and the other regards 
these only as useful means to a higher end. 
The difference may seem small, but between 
these two conceptions is a gulf the width of 
worlds. On one side is the business man; on 
the other side, the prophet. 


VI 


First Murderer. Most royal sir, Fleance is ’scaped. 


-Macbeth. 


S Socrates in Plato’s ‘Euthedemus,’ 



when told that in the process of be¬ 


coming wise a man must lose his ignorant life, 
offers himself for sacrifice, so may the college 
do. A death like that would be a noble ending, 
the sort of ending from which many splendid 
enterprises have sprung.” 

So wrote the author of the liberal experiment 
in 1918. 

This being the romance of an idea, I am 
moved to point out the parallel between its life- 
course and certain concepts central to most if 
not all religions. Like the founders of new 
faiths in myth and history the world over, this 
idea, humble in its station, “led a life of toil for 
mankind,” “was hailed as a Light-bringer, a 
Deliverer,” “was, however, vanquished by the 
Powers of Darkness,” vanished from the scene 


111 


112 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


of its labors in seeming defeat and death, dis¬ 
appeared underground for a while, but sub¬ 
sequently reappeared to various people in vari¬ 
ous forms, became a pioneer of mankind to a 
nobler way of life, and united people of all 
conditions into fraternal bands for the living of 
that life. 

Thus does that which was to have been de¬ 
stroyed spring into life in a hundred places 
where before it grew in only one. 

An idea is a ghost. Slay the body it inhabits, 
and like Banquo it returns to plague the as¬ 
sassin. Plunge your sword into its ghostly 
vitals, with what miraculous unconcern it glides 
on! We children of this world are forever 
hacking away at our spiritual visitants, slay¬ 
ing the idea in one form after another, and for¬ 
ever wondering why the ghost will not lay. 

Why did not the idea, in its Amherst form, 
make a more concerted fight for it physical 
existence ? 

“Here we were,” said one of the resigning 
liberals of the faculty, after Banquo had fallen 
and Fleance had escaped, “a group of people 
who cherished this ideal and were willing to 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


113 


spend our lives working for it. And yet we 
never banded together to protect it. Is it the 
weakness of individualists that they can never 
get together, or is it their strength? Our ad¬ 
versaries organized and worked in magnificent 
team-play. It never seemed to occur to us to 
organize.” 

A truce to autopsies! The kind of people 
who care intensely enough about an idea to 
spend their lives working for it are not usually 
the kind of people who put their faith in or¬ 
ganization. It is a trait universal to those en¬ 
grossed in spiritual concerns that they are in¬ 
different to physical ones. The prophet is no¬ 
toriously careless of his life. He knows that 
his life is not of the body and cannot be de¬ 
stroyed with it. 

And besides, the slayer of the idea was not 
so much any human hand or hands as it was 
the lack of ideas. 

“Enemies?” said Mr. Meiklejohn one day in 
the thick of the contest. “I have no enemy ex¬ 
cept the inability to comprehend. ’’ 

(“Mit der Dummheit kampfen Gotter selbst verge- 
bens.”) 


114 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


The thing that slew the idea walked in one 
evening and sat down at my elbow at a pro¬ 
fessorial dinner-table. It was correctly tai¬ 
lored, brushed, combed, shaven and shorn— 
lodged in the body of an alumnus, rather a fine 
fellow, neither very young nor very old, and 
passionately loyal, in the conformed way, to 
his alma mater. Said he: 

“It is humiliating to us alumni to have the 
teams of our college keep losing games. After 
all, when you get out of college, the doings of 
the teams are about the only connection you 
have with it. And all the public generally 
knows about a college is whether its teams win 
or lose. If they lose, you have to stand a lot 
of kidding from your friends, and if the losing 
goes on long enough they begin to think your 
college is punk. I don’t care how good a 
teacher this Meiklejohn is. If he can’t give 
the college winning teams, he is no man for 
me.” 

I waited for the lightning to strike him dead 
where he sat. Are we not told, “Vengeance is 
mine. I will repay f” But the heavens were 
mute. No bolt disturbed the serene and fatu- 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


115 


ous blue. At the table sat three faculty mem¬ 
bers of the liberal wing. I looked at them. 
They were blandly unperturbed. I suppose 
they were used to it. They must have grown 
calluses on their souls. To my amazement and 
admiration they started in patiently and pleas¬ 
antly to labor with this fallen brother in a 
tone of sweet reasonableness and infinite good 
temper. And why not ? This man was an hon¬ 
est fellow; he was a decent citizen; he meant 
well by his college; he was good to his wife and 
babies; he paid his grocery bills when due. If 
the world has got beyond the point where that 
estate of virtue will save it, whose is the fault? 
I doubt if it can be fairly said to be his. The 
prime object of the educational experiment to 
which he objected was nothing other than to 
take him and his like, and, on the basis of their 
existing character and abilities, erect some sort 
of superstructure of independent thinking- 
power which would, in time, afford some shelter 
in the rainy days to come. Multiply him, his 
virtues and his limitations, by the million, and 
you get some notion of why what was being 
threshed out in this New England college town 


116 PROPHETS UNAWARES 

should have had a meaning for the rest of the 
land. 

But before there can be shadow there must 
be light. And the light was there. It was an 
undergraduate. We had been tramping sev¬ 
eral hours. News, politics, college gossip, all 
the small change of conversation had been 
spent long ago. He was speaking soberly and 
quietly of the muddles which the younger gen¬ 
eration of to-day are expected to set to rights. 
No swagger; no pose; no self-consciousness. 
Only the assumption that as a matter of course 
these overwhelming tasks must be tackled, and 
tackled by the likes of him. 

It was all so natural, the tune went so manly, 
and it was so much the tone proper to his 
age and kind that at first it failed to strike me 
as anything unusual. Then it all came over 
me: 

“This is new. Ten years ago youngsters in 
college or out of it did not talk like this. Why 
should they? How could they? In 1913 our 
world had been in a relatively static condition 
for a hundred years. We who were young, and 
our elders too, supposed things were largely 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 117 

settled. Matters which have since been com¬ 
pletely pulled to pieces and not yet put to¬ 
gether again were in those days considered 
closed subjects. We youngsters were never 
consulted. What was there to consult us 
about? Why teach us to think? All we were 
deemed called upon to do was learn—what had 
already been thought. . . . And now the world 
has gone back to jungle growth. And here is 
a boy of twenty trying the well whetted edge 
of his mind on it. Is he typical of his land and 
generation, or only of his college? Is he typi¬ 
cal of his college or only of a limited group in 
it? At any rate, here he is. And that he is 
here means that more of him are not far off. 
This educational experiment has done the trick 
for him without any doubt. And if it has suc¬ 
ceeded with him, it has succeeded with others. 
And if it succeeds with others, who shall set 
the limits to its possibilities? Who knows but 
that in some such direction as this, order lies, 
and the future?” 

There stand your graduate and undergradu¬ 
ate ; youth and middle age; light and shadow; 


118 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


future and past. The difference between them 
was the difference you saw everywhere in Am¬ 
herst (and elsewhere) between No-Man’s-Land 
and the intellectual front-line trench of creative 
thinking. Was it a question of character? 
There seemed to be men of just as high charac¬ 
ter on one side as on the other. The division 
was more like a difference in eyesight. You 
stood them all on the college hill. Some could 
see the rolling summits of the Holyoke range. 
The rest could only see as far as the golf links. 

Is that difference in eyesight a permanent ele¬ 
ment in human affairs? 

In 1837, after Elijah Love joy had been mur¬ 
dered by a mob in Alton, Illinois, for his anti¬ 
slavery agitation, a meeting was held in Boston 
at Faneuil Hall to protest on behalf of the right 
of free speech. Maria Chapman, writing to 
Harriet Martineau, says that about one third of 
the audience were free-speechers, one third 
were bitter opponents, and one third were be¬ 
twixt and between. There was, in addition, a 
small minority of out-and-out abolitionists. 

The forces at Amherst were aligned in about 
the same proportions, and it is a question if 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 119 

this is not typical of such contests in any land 
or time. 

A strange study it is to watch what a 
searcher of minds and hearts such an issue be¬ 
comes. What is it that ordains that this one 
shall be moved even unto life-purpose by what 
leaves that one cold? Wave a flag, beat a 
drum, proclaim a war-cry, and this one will 
joyously fling himself into a collective enter¬ 
prise to destroy. Conceive an idea, and that 
one will just as joyously fling himself into a 
collective, or even solitary, enterprise to create. 
Does life advance simultaneously along differ¬ 
ent levels of endeavor and intelligence? Is it 
just as needful that those destroy as it is that 
these create? 

There was a young graduate in Amherst than 
whom, I suppose, a finer fellow hardly need be. 
And he said of the liberal administration: 

“It is going to end, and the sooner the better. 
We had better have a good blacksmith for col¬ 
lege president if only he can bring back har¬ 
mony. I am not one of these fellows who cares 
about thinking things through. Things as they 
are suit me well enough.’’ 


120 


PEOPHETS UNAWARES 


Such remarks from the lips of people whom 
you are bound, on one ground or another, to 
respect, reduce one to humility. For you are 
led to surmise that character, of which the 
speaker had a plenty, may he quite as valuable 
a human asset as intellect. He had lived and 
worked and studied certainly four, if not more, 
years in contact with this experiment in liberal 
education and had been apparently untouched 
by it. Well, the generation between 1830 and 
1861, which was mostly untouched by the agita¬ 
tion to free the slaves on grounds of mercy and 
justice, did, nevertheless, carry along the eat¬ 
ing, sleeping, begetting, and rearing operations 
of the country in the interval. These chores 
have to be done, and perhaps that is the right¬ 
ful function of those who elect to stick to the 
doing of them, no more to be despised in its 
estate that the moral courage of the abolition¬ 
ists. 

These things are puzzling. They are, again, 
the doors of question which this academic inter¬ 
lude opens in all directions. And it seems 
more useful to state the questions than to be too 
complacently sure of having the answers to 
them. 


VII 


O NCE more in the Connecticut Valley it is 
spring . . . May, 1923. The Holyoke 
range lifts its green domes into still morning- 
beams; the Goshen Hills are mottled blue and 
green under cloud and sun. Rays of early sun¬ 
shine hurl their golden javelins through the 
new-green foliage; and the bobolinks choir at 
sun-up. A world of blossoming orchards, and 
old-rose sunsets, and blue-glittering evening 
stars, and winds fragrant with the perfume of 
flowers as sweet as the memory of one’s beloved 
dead, and nights of pale clear moonlight. On 
nights without moon, the elms go immeasurably 
up and up into the blue-dark heavens, their 
branches hung with shining stars thick as rip¬ 
ened fruit. You imagine that you could climb 
up and pick a basketful in no time. 

All in these dew-drenched mornings of sun 
and verdure the chapel bell rocks and clangs; 
boys flock hither and yon; classes meet; teams 
121 


122 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


practise; actors and musicians rehearse: it 
seems as though the whole life of the place 
were animated with a zest and glow, a dignity 
and conscious purpose, something keener than 
that of the ordinary college and suggesting 
nothing so much as the days of the Academe 
in Athens that was. 

And, just as Athens had its Aristophanes, so 
Amherst had its Ayres. He had seen fit to pro¬ 
vide a diversion: it was the Idea blossoming 
into comedy. I suspect Ayres of knowing, as 
usual, exactly what he was about. He has that 
expression of childlike innocence which is the 
seal of fathomless guile. At any rate, what he 
did was to make some extremely unflattering 
remarks about art. Instantly the college was 
in an uproar. Between classes, at table, in 
dormitory rooms, at the book-shop, discussion 
raged with such fury as you would have sup¬ 
posed no American community whatsoever 
could have mustered short of a championship 
series, a sex scandal, a murder mystery, or a 
prize-fight. It lasted two weeks, and then had 
to be ended by proclamation. 

The episode provided much newspaper 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


123 


gaiety, beginning with the student daily. That 
publication likewise had felt the visitation of 
the Idea. This showed in its emancipation 
from the portentous dullness which seems to af¬ 
flict college newspapers like a species of chest¬ 
nut blight. “The Student” was well edited. 
Its staff wrote like veterans. No pomposity; 
no banality. When Professor Hamilton deliv¬ 
ered his memorable address on “Freedom and 
Learning” to the seniors at chapel, the editorial 
criticism of it penned by one of these young¬ 
sters carried its thinking a stage beyond that 
of the speaker, and not in the same direction, 
either. Happening to be something in this line 
myself, I could name more than one metropoli¬ 
tan newspaper the editorial columns of which 
would not, in scale, exhibit a quality of writing 
and thinking as creditable as that of this 
student daily. 

So the month of May went on, and, about 
midway in it, word began to be bruited abroad 
that the ax was going to fall on the president 
at commencement-time. But the execution had 
been scheduled so often that even the knitting- 
women had turned skeptics. They would be- 


124 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


lieve that Evremonde was dead when they saw 
his head drop into the basket. 

If execution did impend, the spirits of the 
condemned were undampened. He had wan¬ 
dered into a lecture by Dr. Fitch and seated 
himself at the rear of the room. One of the 
boys asked Fitch a sticker of a question. Fitch 
tussled with it, and then said: 

“Mr. Meiklejohn, how would you handle a 
question like that?” 

“I would ask some one in the back row,” said’ 
Mr. Meiklejohn. 

Again it was a group of somewhat over- 
earnest young folks who had asked him to ad¬ 
dress them on the question of what students 
could do to accelerate the process of liberal 
education. He suggested that they do some 
studying. 

But the rasp of ax-grinding had grown dis¬ 
tinctly audible. And there was no doubt for 
whose neck the blade was being sharpened. 

We have come to the fifth act of the Amherst 
drama. 

And here, in strict accordance with orthodox 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


125 


American practice, should come the “ inside 
facts ’’ blazoned forth as The Real Truth about 
What Happened. Then we could all lick our 
lips and sit up in a sparkle of pleased expec¬ 
tancy, certain of something rich and juicy: 
keyhole peeps into the private affairs of high- 
minded and well-bred people; surreptitious 
spyings into their personal correspondence; 
catalogues of what they ate for breakfast and 
how much they paid for a pair of shoes and 
whether they paid cash down or had them 
charged, and how long the bill ran and whether 
it was really ever paid at all; and insinuations 
that their private lives would not bear too close 
scrutiny; and photographs of their children go¬ 
ing to and from school; and snoopings and snif¬ 
fings in quantity to satisfy that common and 
universal underworld of the emotions, which, 
unless disciplined, will vent itself in the morbid 
curiosity of crowds, and which, as things are at 
present allowed to go, constitutes a most un¬ 
lovely blot on the scutcheon of our public man¬ 
ners. . . . Little as we may care about the life 
and career of an idea, a dish of gossip is some¬ 
thing we can all relish. 


126 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


Alas, Sisters of the Universal Sewing-Circle, 
in this our Nation of Villagers, you and I are 
doomed to disappointment. There is not going 
to be any back-stairs tattle. I do not know The 
Real Truth about What Happened, and if I 
did I would n ’t tell it. I am here to set down 
the romance of an idea and not to flatter small 
minds with a sense of their superiority to 
great ones. The vitality of that idea is such 
that in ten years—in two—no one will know or 
care how its existence was terminated in this 
or that institution, or by whom. 

And when I say high-minded and well bred 
people, I include members of the board of 
trustees who removed President Meiklejohn. 
From all I can gather I see no reason to regard 
them as anything but sincere and worthy gentle¬ 
men placed, by the circumstances of their posi¬ 
tion, in a desperately perplexing and difficult 
situation, and doing the best they knew. Their 
best happens not to suit you and me? Well, 
who are you and I? Omniscience? We are 
here moving not in the realm of melodrama but 
in the realm of ideas, where the going is far 
less mapped; and, in such situations, where, 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 127 

with the best will in the world on both sides, 
purposes and intellects are bound to clash, per¬ 
haps the one thing of permanent value that all 
can bring away from the experience is the thing 
which some of the participants did bring away, 
and that is an unembittered spirit. 

The personal sympathies of this narrator are, 
of course, what they are. In the pages which 
follow I shall of necessity tell what I saw as 
seen through the lens of how I felt about it; 
but after the frank acknowledgment of that 
bias and a warning to the reader to discount it, 
I am very far from wishing to suggest that 
any of the principal actors in the scenes which 
follow were scoundrels, villains, or even false 
friends. Persons are small. The idea is 
great. Our drama is concerned only with that 
and moves only on the public stage. 

The Fifth Act begins with one of those lively 
hubbubs behind the curtain before it rises. A 
newspaper reporter comes and tells the presi¬ 
dent that he has heard that the trustees are 
only waiting until after commencement to dis¬ 
miss him for fear the rumpus the boys would 


128 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


make if it were done before. The president 
discusses the matter candidly with him to such 
effect that he goes away resolved not to spring 
the story, at least for the present. This, con¬ 
sidering that publication would at that time 
greatly have strengthened the presidents hand, 
was not bad sportmanship on his part. 

It was during this episode that one of his 
friends was moved to ask him: 

‘ ‘What chance has an experiment like this of 
being able to survive with the surrounding 
world what it is!” 

“Ask something easy,” said he. “I tell 
Fitch, ‘What does it matter whether we work 
here in a clump or scatter to work separately V 
For my part, if it were not for loyalty to this 
institution, I would be inexpressibly relieved to 
be quit of it all, and glad to go. Sometimes I 
wonder if, human psychology being what it is, 
it would n’t be best for me to be removed. We 
have nearly a thousand boys excited about this. 
A little persecution is all they need to make 
them fanatics for education.” 

“Pray for martyrdom! though if this does 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


129 


break up and you have to go, it will be pretty 
tough on those who are left behind.” 

4 ‘What do they expect of lifer* said he, smil¬ 
ing. 

A few of the younger faculty liberals had al¬ 
ready surmised what to expect. But life has a 
way of sweetening the dose with humor. One 
of them, by good luck, happened upon the “Mi- 
crocosmographia Academica,” a skit on college 
politics by a witty Cambridge man named Corn- 
ford, which might have been written expressly 
for their plight. They gleefully pointed to the 
passage in his category of parties where he de¬ 
scribes : 

The Young Man in a Hurry: a narrow-minded and 
ridiculously thoughtful prig, who is inexperienced 
enough to imagine that something might be done be¬ 
fore very long, and even to suggest definite things. 

. . . The Young Men in a Hurry have no regular 
Caucus. They meet, by twos and threes, in desolate 
places, and gnash their teeth. 

To some of these caucuses of the Young Men 
in a Hurry I had the good luck to be admitted, 
and more hilarious mourning the god of good 


130 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


sportmanship never vouchsafed a beaten party. 

On, meanwhile, went the hinder-curtain hub¬ 
bub. 

There happened, fortunately, to be living in 
Amherst a gifted young journalist named Louis 
Lyons. By equal good fortune there happened 
to be in a city only twenty miles away a liberal 
newspaper, “The Springfield Republican. ’ ’ 
The two met. Resolutely mum as everybody by 
the president’s example felt bound to keep, 
Lyons managed, by that psychological can- 
opener known to the reportorial profession, to 
obtain the facts: of a contemplated removal of 
the president and an impending student revolt. 
There was an editorial conference. The paper 
decided to publish the news. On the morning 
of Thursday, June 14, it was blazoned. 

Then occurred another event in liberal educa¬ 
tion. This vast enginery of public informa¬ 
tion, the press, which, being chiefly in the pos¬ 
session of the propertied classes, tends in gen¬ 
eral to present that aspect of a dispute which 
coincides with conservative views, was, in this 
instance (as happens now and then), manceuv- 
ered into a surprisingly accurate presentation 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 131 

of the liberal side. It was this version which 
was put on the wires and went forth to the 
general newspaper-reading public; and, despite 
efforts at counteracting, it prevailed. 

The consternation in certain quarters over 
this lapse of the press from its accustomed 
course was much as if a lady of dubious repute 
had up and joined the church. 

With that the whole tempo quickened. Be¬ 
fore night the town swarmed with reporters. 
They kept watch over thy going in and thy 
coming out. The college seniors had contem¬ 
plated refusing their degrees in block. They 
had been dissuaded from this, but had sent a 
scouting party to New York to quiz certain of 
the trustees. Sorely puzzled boys the whole of 
the undergraduates were. What they could 
not make out was why their prexy, who was, so 
far as they could learn, never for a minute ac¬ 
cused of any wrong-doing, should be under the 
ax. Poor boys! “What do they expect of 
life?” 

Certain candid ones asked: 

“If they have got anything on him, why don’t 
they spring it ? ” 


132 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


Was there anything to spring? 

There appeared in a Boston newspaper, un¬ 
signed, after the event, an admirably temperate 
statement of the case manifestly from the 
trustees ’ side, which can come, more to its ad¬ 
vantage, later in the proceedings. 

Meanwhile, locally, it was amusing to note 
how generally, to the mind of the American 
small-town middle class as represented in cer¬ 
tain people of the town and valley, the issue of 
liberalism was conceived to be a matter of 
evangelical sectarianism. I know of no epi¬ 
sode in the whole affair more illuminating than 
this of our prevailing mental estate. 

Irreligion had been one of the standing com¬ 
plaints against the president of Amherst. At 
the centennial celebration of the college in 
1921 when he delivered his strikingly pro¬ 
phetic address on what the college could be in 
the next hundred years, it was objected that in 
all his discourse “he never once used the words, 

1 God willing. ’ 99 

Four days before the storm burst he had de¬ 
livered the graduating address at Mount Hol¬ 
yoke College. It was on “Democracy and Ex- 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


133 


cellence.” It dealt with an apparent conflict 
between the impulse to share and the impulse to 
excel; faced the difficulty as between the mud¬ 
died thinking of the crowd-emotion and the 
solitary strivings of the few who hunger and 
thirst after excellence; but declared that rec¬ 
onciled this conflict must be, if not by us, then 
by some other people willing to shoulder the 
task. 

At the end, an old lady was heard anxiously 
to inquire: 

“Was that good orthodox Christianity?” 

And, at the luncheon which followed, an eld¬ 
erly clergyman: 

“It was a fine address: but why couldn’t he 
have quoted Jesus instead of Epictetus?” 

Walking back to Amherst over the Holyoke 
range through the radiant June weather, I was 
given a lift in an automobile by a stout and 
heavy-jowled gentleman who appeared to be an 
insurance merchant. He was a friendly soul. 
Dwelt in the Connecticut Valley. Took an in¬ 
terest in public affairs. In the difficulties at 
Amherst, for example. What did he think? 

“If I had the handling of this affair, I would 


134 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


fire that man Meiklejohn so quick he wouldn’t 
know what had happened.’’ 

“Why?” 

“Why? The man is an infidel!” 

“Indeed! How does it show itself? I un¬ 
derstood you to say just now that he was no 
doubt a good teacher, and well liked by the 
boys. Are they demoralized by his influence ? ’ ’ 

“No. But there is no spiritual life in the 
college. It was founded as a sectarian institu¬ 
tion, and he has taken all the sectarianism out 
of it. And these boys come from good Chris¬ 
tian homes. It’s not right.” 

I alighted from the car. I all but clutched 
my head. I thought: 

“0 House of Hades, man-devouring, will thy 
maw never be full? These wretched folk are 
living back in the year 1859, and the age of 
the scientific-theological shindy. Is it possible 
that they do not know that anything has hap¬ 
pened since the publication of ‘Origin of Spec¬ 
ies’? They have not even so much as smelled 
the property question. In an age of economic 
upheaval will they go on babling of religious 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


135 


sectarianism? No wonder it is so easy to lead 
them by their noses into an imperialistic war 
by the mouthing of any political patter. Are 
they culprits or are they victims? Is it be¬ 
cause they refuse to learn or because they never 
had a fair chance? They lose their cherished 
property in war taxes; they lose their boys on 
foreign ’battle-fields; they lose their liberties 
and never miss them until they are gone. And 
they belabor any one who attempts to tell them 
how they are being victimized. Sancta sim- 
plicitas! In the name of the Mariner’s Com¬ 
pass, where are we? Let us pray to new 
gods! There is no help in the old . 9 9 

And then no sooner have you tuned your lyre 
for elegy than the measure changes to paean. 

Only the next day, in almost the identical 
spot on the road, two youths in a rattlety-bang 
flivver gave me a lift. One was a junior, the 
other a sophomore. Neither knew me from 
Adam. The talk drifted from wayfaring com¬ 
monplaces to the college. I inquired about 
their studies. Their replies turned into a sea¬ 
son of praise for Dr. Fitch. 


136 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


“I took his Bible course, freshman year,’’ 
said the sophomore. “You know a fellow my 
age is apt to think the Bible a pretty dumb book. 
But he made it so interesting that you r d have 
thought it was the daily paper talking about 
current events. It seemed as if the same 
things were happening then that are happening 
now, only people called them by different 
names. I got so I ’d go nosing around in the 
Bible on my own hook to see what I could find.’ 9 

“That course got me going the same way,” 
said the junior. “You know about how much 
stock the average fellow takes in ‘miracles.’ 
Well, he had me so interested that I worked up 
a special study on ‘The Miracles of Jesus,’ and 
never studied so hard on anything in my 
life.” 

For the remaining distance into Amherst the 
two boys took turns pronouncing eulogy on Dr. 
Fitch as a scholar, as a host, as a preacher, and 
as a man, one taking it up where the other left 
off, strophe and antistrophe. They bragged of 
his reputation as a preacher as if it had been 
their own: “Why, he’s dated up a year in 
advance!”— You gathered that Fitch had 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 137 

made a tremendous hit in this quarter and that 
the Bible was quoted strong. 

Now it was commencement week and the 
town filled with alumni. The place is shy on 
restaurants. One hotel, sundry boarding¬ 
houses already full of voracious young males; 
a lunch-room; a hot-dog cart; and a prodigi¬ 
ously mirrored, show-cased, soda-fountained, 
candy-countered, and marble-slabbed cafe 
known as “the GreekV’ comprise its reper¬ 
tory. 

To the Greek’s, accordingly, repaired young 
graduates and old, pro and anti, friend and foe. 

In the first Lawrence strike of 1912, there 
was a quick-lunch restaurant where strike- 
leaders, militia officers, reporters, state police, 
detectives, gum-shoe men, peasants, retainers, 
and others all used to eat, separately but to¬ 
gether. It was a kind of Hunger Truce. Once 
outside it was cat-watch-mouse and dog-eat-dog; 
bricks might fly, bullets whiz, and clubs fall. 
But once within the sacrosanct precincts of that 
restaurant, sconce and scalp were safe; all was 
order and peace. After all, differ as we may 


138 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


about other points of doctrine, there is one 
thing we all hold sacred, and that is a square 
meal. 

When everybody was comfortably seated at 
the Greek’s in Amherst during that commence¬ 
ment week of 1923, and happily burning their 
fingers on the red-hot shells of boiled eggs, all 
I could think of was that restaurant in Law¬ 
rence in the January of 1912. Friend and foe 
sat cheek by jowl. Only by the exercise of ex¬ 
treme caution could you avoid planting your 
elbow in the coffee-cup of your dearest enemy. 
Verbally, therefore, you had to watch your step. 
Conversation of such suave urbanity I never 
heard before and never expect to hear again. 
It was as though everybody had bet everybody 
else his bottom dollar that under no provoca¬ 
tion would he be anything but a gentleman and 
it was do or die. 

Which leads to the main observation. In the 
presence of these whimsical resemblances and 
differences it seemed to me that I had seen at 
Lawrence in 1912 the start of the workers ’ rev¬ 
olution in America; and by revolution I do not 
mean a chaotic welter of blood and violence, 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


139 


but the birth of a new age. And it seemed to 
me that at Amherst in 1923 I was seeing the 
start of an intellectual revolution; and by rev¬ 
olution I do not mean an outburst of blind 
passion, but the flaming of a beacon-fire from 
the solitary and night-curtained peak of a crea¬ 
tive idea into a multitude of minds round about, 
enkindling them till all the heights should be 
aglow. 

On Saturday evening came the alumni pa¬ 
rade. It is the usual thing. You rig up, by 
classes, as an Apache brave or an Alpine guide, 
or king of the Cannibal Isles, or something; 
burn red fire, shout, sing, and, especially if 
getting on in years, tell yourself that you are 
having a high old time. 

It was an event this year fraught with mis¬ 
givings. Anything might happen. During the 
day the undergraduates had issued a special 
edition of their college newspaper which po¬ 
litely read the riot act to their alumni in the 
form of two solid pages’ broadside indorsement 
of the liberal administration. The misgiving 
was that the older alumni might retaliate by a 


140 PROPHETS UNAWARES 

frankly hostile demonstration against the presi¬ 
dent, who was, as custom bade, to address the 
parade from the chapel steps. 

Drum-thump and brass band; cheers and red 
fire. The procession serpentined up the cam¬ 
pus and hill to that white-pillared portico of the 
red-brick meeting-house, high on its ridge of 
pines and maples, fronting westward and an 
evening sky of ruddy orange afterglow. 

The president stood high on the steps in full 
view of the multitude, looking self-possessed 
and pleasant, but with just the shadow of the 
expression of one who expects to be struck in 
the face in public. And a good many people ex¬ 
pected that he would be. The instant the pro¬ 
cession stopped, the seniors seized the moment 
to let off a cheer for their prexy. Several 
other classes followed in rapid-fire order. A 
situation was created in which it would have 
taken a good deal of effrontery to shout public 
insults. Among certain of the alumni liquor 
had been flowing, and here and there was one 
in the incipient stages of a noisy drunk and not 
too chary of tongue; but their grumblings were 
only annoying to those who stood near. 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


141 


The president spoke. 

He was frank. He made no bones about the 
situation. He was witty. He told a contempo¬ 
raneous anecdote lightly spiced at his own ex¬ 
pense, about a graduate of many years ago 
who had returned to Amherst after a long ab¬ 
sence to find it all wrought up over whether 
President Gates was to go. “And now, as 
many years later, he is back again. I 
don’t know whether he is in hard luck or just 
a bird of ill omen.” He said the trustees were 
doing their best to meet a trying situation in a 
way worthy of men; that the commencement 
season was meant to be one of jollity and it was 
the part of everybody to “keep hearts clean 
and preserve the fellowship of the season.” 

Much as was in the matter, more was in the 
manner. An emanation of high-mindedness 
went out from him. Here was a man placed, 
to the world’s view, in a bitterly humiliating 
position, too great to be humiliated by it, and 
triumphing by the sheer moral superiority of 
his mind and character. Away over the Con¬ 
necticut Valley westward, the mountains were 
hazed in evening blue. For some reason or 


142 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


other one wanted just then to look at mountains 
and not at people. And I thought: 

“How he lifts this whole squabble out of its 
pettiness and squalor.” 

One of the reporters came by. He said: 

“Am I prejudiced, or is he a great man?” 

We left the question to be answered by our 
betters. 

But in that gathering on the college hill the 
issue was defined before one’s eyes—and an 
issue a good deal wider than Amherst or any 
other college. It was the issue which divides 
the whole of the Western world, and one which 
has perhaps always divided human society. 
The undergraduates and the recently gradu¬ 
ated classes were passionate supporters of the 
liberal idea; the elder classes were, in general, 
apathetic or hostile. It was youth against 
age; yesterday against to-morrow. ... It 
always is. 

The crowd dissolved and began to flow down 
the hill. In front of the college library under 
the elms stood a knot of reporters. One of 
them, who came from Boston and was an old 
friend, accosted. 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


143 


“The fellows from the New York papers,” 
said he, “take a frankly cynical view of this. 
They say the thing is all settled and has been 
for weeks; that the trustees have their orders 
to get rid of him. What some of the alumni 
would like to do would be to send him away 
with insults. I hear that one class, in an access 
of exuberance, had a banner they were going 
to carry in the parade with the legend: 

“We paid his bills. We sent him to Europe. . . . 
I ’ll say it’s a Liberal College.” 

The story is that Wall Street is afraid of him 
and the movement he has started and has de¬ 
creed that it stop.” 

“But all he has started is an impartial 
search for the truth about modern society.” 

My reporter friend laughed: 

“Is that all? Well, isn’t that about the 
last thing modern society can afford to allow?” 

“It was a fine address; but why couldn’t he 
have quoted Jesus instead of Epictetus?” 

Well, the next morning, from the pulpit of 


144 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


the college church, he did quote Jesus, to 
deadly effect. 

It was, by the rotation of office, the presi¬ 
dent’s turn to deliver the baccalaureate ser¬ 
mon. One week later, listening by radio, you 
might have heard the minister of the historic 
church in Boston, where Lloyd Garrison made 
his first speech against slavery, thanking God 
that an enemy of religion had been removed 
from the presidency of Amherst College. 
What had this enemy of religion chosen as the 
theme of his baccalaureate? Christianity. 

Sunday brought one of those June mornings 
which go as if rimed and set to music. It put 
you in mind of that lyric page which opens 
Emerson’s “Divinity School Address”: 

“In this refulgent summer it has been a lux¬ 
ury to draw the breath of life. The grass 
grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted 
with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The 
air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of 
the pine, the balm of Gilead, and the new hay. 

. . . The mystery of nature was never dis¬ 
played more happily. The corn and the wine 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


145 


have been freely dealt to all creatures, and the 
never-broken silence with which the old beauty 
goes forward has not yielded yet one word of 
explanation. One is constrained to respect the 
perfection of this world, in which our senses 
converse. How wide; how rich; what invita¬ 
tion from every property it gives to every fac¬ 
ulty of man!” 

Church-bells clanged. Up the college hill 
moved the seniors in black-gowned procession, 
like some “mourning college” out of Dante. 

Behind the church on a little greensward 
among the trees in a drench of sunshine were 
Hinners the organist, and two or three of his 
chanting cherubs in academic choir robes. 

Salutations were mock-ceremonious, ironic 
in the sense of its being a glorious June mor¬ 
ning and bright, happy day. For a mourning 
college in truth it already was with everybody 
as festive as a funeral-bell. 

The church filled. Reporters had been at 
pains to obtain front-row seats in the side gal¬ 
leries. The organ was intoning a chorale of 
Cesar Franck. The president took his place 


146 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


on the rostrum, robed in his doctor’s gown. 
His face bore the shadows and hollows of fa¬ 
tigue. 

The seniors entered and took their places in 
the pews reserved for them. 

There were hymns, and prayers by a college 
officer. 

Then the president rose and said: 

“I will read a parable of Jesus.” 

It was that of the sower. He began to read, 
in firm and deliberate accents. It was as 
though one were hearing that parable for the 
first time. It was also as though it had been 
composed expressly to fit the present situation. 
Sower and seed were there, and so was every 
kind of ground: stony, shallow, and fertile. 
Some fell where it had not much earth, and 
some fell among thorns, and other fell on good 
ground. 

“He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” 

Then came a hymn or an anthem or some¬ 
thing. 

As it went on I noticed a bit of by-play which 
may sound like a trifle, but may nevertheless be 
a sign of how far things had gone when you 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


147 


consider what a point of pride it is with young 
men of our land and breed not to betray emo¬ 
tion. He was standing beside a marble pillar 
in front of a bronze memorial tablet. One of 
the undergraduate ushers, who, having seated 
everybody else, probably found himself obliged 
to stand. Nobody I knew. An athlete by his 
frame. (It later transpired that he had been 
one of the class presidents.) He was looking 
at the head of the college, who was looking else¬ 
where. His expression changed. In spite of 
himself his eyes filled. He stood his ground, 
hands clasped behind back, in full view of half 
the congregation. And so little did the young 
thoroughbred care for what they thought that 
after a while he coolly produced a handkerchief 
and wiped his eyes. . . . Before the week was 
over he had plenty of company. 

The preacher came to the lectern, opened his 
manuscript, and began. That he should have 
been able to produce anything at all amid the 
honking din of the preceding ten days was as¬ 
tounding. That he should have been able to 
compose what he did signifies a power of de¬ 
tachment which can lift a man entirely clear of 


148 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


inharmonious surroundings. You never would 
have known anything had been happening. 
His theme must have been suggested by the sit¬ 
uation he was in, but, as characteristic of minds 
above a certain caliber, the thinking, while 
parallel to the surrounding circumstances, 
was raised an entire stratum above it, out of 
the particular into the universal. And here, 
with no wish to be discourteous, it seems ad¬ 
missible to say that if there is anything in the 
theory of the psychic effect of strongly sympa¬ 
thetic and antipathetic thought-vibrations, this 
man’s consciousness had for days been a battle¬ 
ground. For the town had been full of old men 
hating him and young men loving him. Yet 
when he began to speak you moved in a serene 
upper atmosphere of tranquil thought. 

How much was in the matter and how much 
in the personal power of the man it would be 
impossible to say. Repeatedly I had been told 
that he cast a thought-spell over his audiences. 
I had myself once or twice seen him do it. Per¬ 
haps the already tense emotion of his present 
audience had much to do with it. But certainly 
a most extraordinary power seemed to go forth 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 149 

from this speaker. The mind that gave and 
the mind that received were alone together in a 
void, remote from time and space. Every¬ 
thing else—edifice, people, surrounding events 
—had fallen away into nothingness. The word 
had become a power which nullified all other be¬ 
ing except whatsoever good ground it might 
find to fall in. Again and again you would be 
conscious of one of those strange visitings—of 
the sense of having been in this identical spot 
and situation long ago and not only once but 
many times. Where? When? 

Well, to the daylight consciousness there was 
more than a suggestion of that Divinity School 
Address of Emerson back in 1838. That was 
a bold and epochal affirmation of liberalism in 
religion—the frontiering territory of that pe¬ 
riod. Here was an affirmation of the same 
principle in another field: on the behalf of edu¬ 
cation, one of the frontiering territories of our 
time, and, who knows? perhaps the richest one. 

He made an end. It was like coming out of 
.a trance. One came to. The world of time 
and space resumed. All around were people 
similarly coming back into the here and now. 


150 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


The service ended. The seniors passed out 
in procession. Their faces wore curious ex¬ 
pressions. One or two there were whom you 
would have supposed to have been about as 
hard-boiled as they come. Their visages now 
looked not hard-boiled but parboiled. They 
had undisguisably been in tears. But so, for 
that matter, had a good half of the class. 

Once outside the church no one seemed dis¬ 
posed to talk. There seemed to be nothing 
much to say. Over under the oaks stood a 
group of reporters. For brethren of that pro¬ 
fessionally glib fraternity they looked oddly 
speechless, with an expression of “ where do we 
go from here?” At length one of them said: 

U I suppose the results of a senior class meet¬ 
ing scheduled for this afternoon takes prece¬ 
dence as news over that baccalaureate; but I 
doubt if that is any compliment to our defini¬ 
tion of news. I shall wire my city editor to 
print the baccalaureate in full, even if he has 
to drop half a column of a murder story to 
make room for it.” 

Another said: 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


151 


“It really doesn’t matter whether such a 
man stays here or goes somewhere else. Let 
them fire him if they like. Whether he goes or 
whether he stays, he has won.” 

Not the least noteworthy part of the bacca¬ 
laureate was its discussion of the Pharisee. 
Now, the Pharisee has always been a puzzle, 
alike to sage and reformer. The sage is in¬ 
structed by observing that Pharisees are dis¬ 
concertingly decent citizens, “practical men” 
—only a little deficient in sympathetic insight 
and imagination. The reformer, for his part, 
usually curses them uphill and down dale. 
Lloyd Garrison’s language is a steady confla¬ 
gration. But some of that recorded of Jesus— 
if recorded truthfully—is hardly much milder. 
You will search far in the literature of invec¬ 
tive for anything that scalds and flays like 
those stanzas of “Woe unto you, scribes and 
Pharisees, hypocrites!” Now the preacher of 
this baccalaureate, being in a measurably simi¬ 
lar situation, treated the Pharisees rather 
handsomely. They were, he said, after all, the 


152 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


practical men, the men who knew how to get 
things done. Was n’t there some way in which 
they and the reformers could get together? 

And so, acting on the spirit of fair play which 
animated that baccalaureate, at this point I 
propose to round on myself and give the other 
side its innings. For the object in writing this 
is not to prove a point but to engender thought. 
And the Amherst drama is distinctive in that 
while having a hero it has no villain. 

Personally I would hate to think that the trustees 
and faculty members who were the immediate causes 
of Mr. Meiklejohn’s removal and the anti-liberal 
action at Amherst were merely tools for some selfish, 
egotistical, anti-social interests, or that they them¬ 
selves did what they did from any but the most dis¬ 
interested motives and an earnest desire to remedy 
a situation which seemed to them to be bad. 

So wrote one of the dozen seniors who re¬ 
fused their degrees at the ensuing commence¬ 
ment in protest against the action of the trus¬ 
tees, and the letter was written after he had re¬ 
fused the degree for which he had worked four 
years. He continues: 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


153 


All I know or think I know about this particular 
phase of the subject is confined to a feeling that the 
financial powers or “big business,’’ those whose for¬ 
tunes have been made under an older system, are 
likely to regard that state of affairs as the normal, 
natural way for things to be. They cannot help but 
regard a change to anything else as a change for the 
worse. But it seems to me that they must be, for the 
most part, perfectly sincere. They are all men who 
have been brought up under different conditions so 
that they see everything through different glasses 
which are out of focus for present times. Their chief 
fault is that they steadfastly refuse to make any at¬ 
tempt at readjustment. Still, I think that the fight 
must be carried on with perfect frankness and open- 
mindedness, without any bitterness or hatred or 
attempts to color the arguments on either side. 
Otherwise, we shall never get anywhere at all. It 
seems to me that it should be done in the way prexy 
tried to do it if it is ever to win. It would then be in 
reality a process of liberal education for every one, 
on either side, who took part in it. 


Let us try to be as fair-minded as this. 

Suppose that you or I had spent the best 
years of our lives giving the best that was in 
us — an d often a very good best it was—to an 
institution of learning. Then suppose new 


154 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


men—many of them having had no previous 
association with this college—came in and pro¬ 
posed to make it over. Suppose we were far 
from convinced that their idea was the right 
one and could give good reasons for our skepti¬ 
cism. Suppose we thought we had, or did have, 
cause to expect that we might be shelved in fa¬ 
vor of up-and-coming younger men. They 
might call it an experiment in liberal educa¬ 
tion, but was it liberal treatment to those who 
were conceivably just as earnest servants of 
education as themselves? Courteous as they 
might be, would it be pleasant to feel that all 
the same they regarded you as a back number? 
Or perhaps some of them were not at all times 
as courteous as they might have been. And, 
speaking of Pharisees, would it not be well to 
remember that unless you look out, Pharisee is 
likely to become a name for somebody you don’t 
like? The reformers are useful (if noisy) peo¬ 
ple; but what about the folks who keep quiet 
and saw wood? Suppose some or all of the 
political and economic doctrines of these men 
were to you abhorrent, and you knew they 
would be the same to most of the older alumni 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


155 


whose minds you had nourished. What more 
natural than that you and they should join 
forces? Nobody but a fanatic would suggest 
that the college was not a pretty good place be¬ 
fore they came. It could go on being an 
equally good if not better place when they were 
gone. 

This is the common language of common life, 
and there is more to be said for it than innova¬ 
tors are generally willing to admit. One, how¬ 
ever, I have heard make the admission, and he 
was one who had endured enough kicking 
around to have earned the right to speak. He 
had for his radicalism suffered dismissal from 
more than one academic post; he had been 
hounded by government secret-service agents; 
threatened with the tar-kettle; and finally, in 
war-time, tried for treason. After all of which 
he was a good enough sportsman to say: 

“People like me are of course necessary to 
society, but if everybody were like me human 
society couldn’t go on.” 

And it was Mr. Meiklejohn himself who said 
that throughout the 'closing days of the affair 
he was chiefly mindful of the magnitude of the 


156 PROPHETS UNAWARES 

idea and the smallness of the surrounding 
events. 

If there was high-mindedness on one side, 
there has been magnanimity on the other. For 
men under such heavy provocation the trustees 
said surprisingly little, and what they did say 
was temperate and courteous. 

That they, in turn, had something to contend 
with, can be read between the lines of that mod¬ 
erate and dignified statement, manifestly ema¬ 
nating from their side, which appeared in a 
Boston paper: 

The public seems to be puzzled over the case of 
President Meiklejohn of Amherst. This is because 
they have read the public statements and criticisms 
and know but little of the real situation. There is 
no need any longer for secrecy. 

The attempt to class the Meiklejohn episode as a 
case where the theories and teachings of an honest, 
radical president were distasteful to the conserva¬ 
tive, reactionary “Big Business ” trustees is far be¬ 
side the mark. President Meiklejohn’s teachings 
were not objected to. He is a radical and an idealist, 
but not more so than hundreds of college professors. 
As a teacher he is one of the most inspiring instruc¬ 
tors of young men to be found in America. His 
personal students were not only devoted to him but 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 157 

they are his ardent champions. He frankly taught 
the imperfections of American democracy. He 
was a pacifist and a passionate one. He felt 
the American social system wrong and said so. He 
did not believe in the teaching methods of the aver¬ 
age American college and made no secret of his 
criticisms. But these things were not the compelling 
force in deciding the trustees to remove him. True, 
these theories did not meet with universal approval 
among the trustees, but until the past year a large 
majority of the board had staunchly stood by the 
president. He had the same ideas 11 years ago when 
he came to Amherst, as he has now. 

Practically all the trustees wished President 
Meiklejohn to remain a teacher. They knew his 
value, but they also realized his limitations. 

When he came to Amherst he was given free rein. 
He was allowed to install certain young teachers of 
his own choosing. He was, however, critical of most 
of the members of the older faculty. He felt he 
could not work with them. Yet he was so much in 
favor with the trustees at that time that he could 
doubtlessly have secured the dismissal of most of the 
professors against whom he complained. He did 
not, however, take this step. Yet he took no paing 
to conceal his personal dislike of certain members 
of the faculty. The young Meiklejohn men on the 
faculty were neither discreet nor tactful in predict¬ 
ing what would be the fate of the “old mossbacks” 
among their colleagues. 

The result was that the older members of the 


158 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


faculty grew alarmed. They feared they were to he 
cast out of positions which were so much a part of 
their lives. They had grown up with Amherst in 
all the Amherst traditions. A sharp line thus di¬ 
vided the faculty. The feud even spread to the 
households so that wives in the two factions would 
not speak. The whole town was split apart. 

The great majority of the students, in fact, practi¬ 
cally all, were loyal supporters of the president and 
the younger members of the faculty. There was a 
comradeship between them. Some of the young 
professors would smoke a pipe during the lecture 
and urge those among the students who cared to, 
to “light up.” Sometimes lectures would be held in 
the professor’s room with the students sitting about 
on the floor, the hour being utilized as a sort of 
smoke talk, an informal debate, in which everyone 
joined. This was greatly relished by the students 
and undoubtedly lent interest and stimulus to the 
courses. But it certainly clashed with New Eng¬ 
land traditions, and doubtless few parents could see 
the value of it. 

Amherst has been in the past a religious college. 
The president was not anti-religious, but he thought 
it not of great value and had little to do with 
churches. 

He and his family took no part in the social life 
of Amherst. He did not vote. He did not send his 
children to the public schools. He looked on the 
town as a thing apart. The students followed his 
example. 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


159 


Again President Meiklejohn seemed to have no 
conception of financial affairs. He choose to over¬ 
rule, in some cases, the trustees’ disposition of funds. 
He could not regulate his own financial affairs. His 
salary (presumed to be in the vicinity of $18,000) 
was frequently overdrawn, so much so that when 
he was a year overdrawn in his salary the trustees 
were obliged to call a halt. 

The Amherst alumni were out of sympathy with 
the Meiklejohn regime and the president was openly 
critical of the alumni. He felt they exercised a bad 
influence on the college. They were not welcomed 
as advisers. 

In the end more than half the faculty, nearly all 
the older alumni and the trustees ranged themselves 
against the president. Had he been a tactful per¬ 
suasive man he might have won them to his side. 
But he is a zealot, a firm believer in his own theories, 
who will not compromise and delights in contro¬ 
versy. He is a Scot with all the honest stubbornness 
and the refusal to yield on a principle he believes 
in that characterizes the race. He is a silent, diffi¬ 
dent man in private, but a speaker of such wonderful 
persuasiveness as to sway men’s minds almost to his 
liking. As a teacher, a moulder of young men’s 
minds, he is wonderful. 

As an administrator, in the opinion of those who 
reluctantly decided against him, he failed completely. 
He was alive to all the errors of Amherst, but he 
constructed no new foundation on which to build the 
college of the future. He was, as he says, intoler- 


160 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


ant of majorities and he chafed at authority. He 
could not stand men whose views clashed with his. 

To uphold him it would have been necessary to 
dismiss many men who have devoted their lives to 
Amherst, cut off the alumni from participating in 
the activities of the college and make the trustees 
a mere rubber stamp for the president. The trustees 
would not make the sacrifice. 

For all that, Alexander Meiklejohn remains a 
unique and stimulating figure in American life. 
The nation and the colleges need such a vigorous 
and single-minded critic. His views may yet 
triumph. But Amherst could not afford to take the 
chance. 

The foregoing is hardly the accent of anger, 
and it sounds as much as may be like the lan¬ 
guage of gentlemen. 

If we are to attempt a balancing of the is¬ 
sues, the best formulation comes, I think, from 
a son of one of the trustees. He said: 

“To a large extent I think it was uncon¬ 
scious suppression by an alarmed upper class. 
So far as the last three years of Mr. Meikle¬ 
john ’s administration are concerned I do not 
think liberalism or any other ism was a con¬ 
scious issue at all. But I do think that, a few 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 161 

years before, this upper class began to be 
alarmed and set out to find fault. 

“The trustees were remarkably fair and re¬ 
markably lenient, and there is no doubt that 
there was powerful pressure from the faculty 
and older alumni; but I feel that those who put 
him in expected him to be a college president 
and not a great spiritual leader, and when he 
was found wanting in the expected part, he had 
to go.” 


VIII 


T HOSE who dwelt in the midst of the events 
which followed found it difficult to credit 
the extent of the attention that was being ex¬ 
cited. To go from this country town back into a 
large city and find how closely the issue was be¬ 
ing studied was something of a startler. In the 
years 1920, 1921, and 1922 it had sometimes 
been an effort, profoundly interested as you 
might be in this educational undertaking, to 
persuade yourself that it was fraught with as 
much significance to the country at large as you 
wished it were. What was a laboratory of five 
hundred boys in a remote New England valley? 
But now the newspaper press had deafened 
such questionings. Yet at the same time it was 
a lesson in the extremely relative importance 
of newspaper publicity. During eleven years 
this educational experiment had gone on 
quietly, exciting little interest save from those 
who care for that kind of thing. That was 
162 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 163 

normality. The instant conditions became 
acutely abnormal—as soon as the idea was put 
in the position of having to fight with its back 
to the wall—it was “news” and riveted the gaze 
of a wide public. Does this mean that one must 
get into the front-page head-lines in order to 
prevail? It does not, although the majority 
of our fellow-countrymen appear to think it 
does. It means quite the reverse. For the seed 
was sown and the crop raised in those eleven 
years of comparative quietude, and there or no¬ 
where will the harvest be. Sweet are the uses 
of obscurity. It is written that a cat may look 
at a king; and with this immense advantage, 
that the king is not likely to be looking at the 
cat. Obscurity, like many another blessing, 
brightens as it takes its flight. 

So, for the next three or‘four days, the Fifth 
Act of the Amherst drama was performed to 
a hugeous audience. Wires tingled, presses 
roared, and millions read. And understood 
what they read ? I wonder. 

On Monday the impending event was fore¬ 
casted. On Tuesday it came, in the form of a 
forced resignation under protest. The stu- 


164 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


dents lowered the flag on the chapel tower to 
half-staff, and tolled the college bell. On Wed¬ 
nesday, at the commencement exercises, twelve 
of the seniors, and one who was to have re¬ 
ceived the degree of master of arts, refused 
their degrees and left the hall. These thirteen, 
representing ability and academic distinction 
of every sort, were from the pick of the college, 
and, one is tempted to add, the pick of the land. 
Their quality commended their act, and their 
act commended their quality. And they took, 
where none could say them yea or nay, a higher 
degree than any within the bestowal of Am¬ 
herst or any other college. 1 

In the afternoon of the same day at the gym¬ 
nasium came the Tod und Verklarung of the 
Idea. It was one of those events which were 
never intended—in more senses than one. In¬ 
deed, active measures had been contemplated to 
avoid any such incident. But as they say at the 

1 Their names are: Carlisle Bolton-Smith, Philip W. Conrad, 
Robert B. Freeman, Richard B. Cowan, Eppert R. McKay, 
Alfred H. Taylor, Jr., Daniel J. Bertrand, Samuel K. Everett. 
Hermann H. Giles, William A. Greene, Williard L. McKinstry, 
Cyrus F. Stimson, and Frank C. A. Meyers. 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 165 

end of the Greek fate-dramas, “A way there 
was where no man thought.** 

The day was swelteringly hot. Alumni and 
guests pack themselves into the college gym¬ 
nasium for a fraternal meal; the older classes 
seated down the middle of the hall; the younger 
ones banked at the sides and rear; with a table 
raised on a dais at one end for chairman and 
speakers. 

It began deadly dull. There were intermina¬ 
ble awards of prizes and the usual necessary 
but tedious distribution of administrative 
chicken-feed. Then there were speeches. How 
many I do not know. One lost count. 

Now, when everybody is full of one idea and 
the speaker feels compelled to avoid it and talk 
about something else, he might be Demosthenes, 
Peter the Hermit, Mirabeau, Wendell Phillips, 
the Rev. William Sunday, and Sir Harry 
Lauder rolled into one, and the audience would 
still be bored. One speaker executed some in¬ 
tricate figure-skating on the thin ice of topi¬ 
cally allusive innuendo in a style not so grace¬ 
ful as he might have wished. What the next 


166 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


speaker talked about I do not know, but I am 
told he talked about forty-five minutes. And 
the day was warm. And everybody was listen¬ 
ing to one thing and thinking of another. And 
the spirits of the assemblage were being gradu¬ 
ally extinguished under mountainous tons of 
boredom. 

Then came Dr. Willard Sperry, who had that 
day been awarded an honorary degree which he 
had had some qualms about accepting. He be¬ 
gan speaking in tones and terms which went 
through the assemblage like an electric shock. 
At the end he said: 

‘‘I am an itinerant preacher. I go up and 
down the land from end to end. But the one 
place and the one time which stand out in my 
experience above all others is the hour after 
my Sunday sermon here in Amherst which I 
spend talking things over with Mr. Meiklejohn 
in his study. So, being a parson, I am going 
to leave with you two texts: ‘And they , 
whether they will hear , or whether they will 
forbear . . . yet shall know that there hath 
been a prophet among them 9 . . . and, ‘Re 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 167 

shall see of the travail of his soul and shall be 
satisfied” 

That was the spark which detonated the first 
explosion. From then to the end the blaze thus 
kindled increased until it became a conflagra¬ 
tion. 

The conventional thing at this point would be 
to insert verbatim Mr. Meiklejohn’s valedic¬ 
tory. I shall not do so. Not because the 
speech was unprepared. Not because he had, 
when he rose, hardly an idea beyond that of 
being expected to say something. Not because 
the preceding furor of applause had all but 
made it impossible for him to say anything at 
all. Not because when he began by cracking a 
couple of good jokes at his own expense he 
promptly experienced an all-gone feeling at the 
discovery that his audience had got beyond the 
point where they could laugh. But because in 
such a situation the words, even the ideas, con¬ 
tain the least part of the signification. They 
are little more than a cover under which the 
real interchange takes place. The inner reality 
was here not a word nor even an idea; it was 


168 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


an event. It was something even less material 
than that. It was an electricity. 

The ideas, for the sake of the connection, may 
be briefly summarized. He said that he was 
leaving because the faculty and trustees had so 
decreed, and he thought they were wrong about 
it, but he was amazed that the experiment had 
lasted as long as it did. He said that the dan¬ 
ger to the American college was of being drawn 
into acceptance of the mediocre standards of 
common life as its own; that America is a land 
still far from democracy, thinking in terms of 
privilege, possession, position, and social 
clique; that it is a people uneducated in its task 
of trying to educate its children to their task, 
yet embarked on a tremendous spiritual adven¬ 
ture in which it needs guidance, especially from 
the colleges. One of the speakers had said that 
enough truth had already been discovered in 
the past; the thing to do now was to use it. 
“Keep the best of the past.’’ And the valedic¬ 
torian made reply: “Yes; and the best of the 
past is change. For change is life. And life 
that does not change is death.** He said that 
the conflict was between the two conceptions of 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 169 

intelligence: one, that intelligence is a thing 
you can have, get, and keep, handed down out 
of the past by a teacher or out of a book; the 
other, that intelligence is a process—something 
that you must do. He said that he thought 
trustees should be abolished and the college run 
by the faculty, but just how they were to do it 
was still a dilemma. *‘The faculty find it ex¬ 
ceedingly difficult to improve themselves, and 
they find it exceedingly objectionable to have 
any one else do it for them.” He said that the 
alumni influence was a thing to be prized and 
fostered, but that before the college would cease 
to be injured by their sentimentalism and mis¬ 
understanding, the alumni needed to be edu¬ 
cated. For himself he said that he did not pro¬ 
pose to be either soft or bitter. If he said that 
this was a mere incident in his life they would 
think he was flippant. If he said he was taking 
it terribly hard they would think he was soft and 
a weakling. . . . “ The point is, I am a minority 
man. I am always wanting change. I am al¬ 
most invariably, in an issue, against the larger 
number. That being the case, I am perfectly 
willing to take my medicine. ... I go some- 


170 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


where else, I don’t know where; but I am going 
in the same way. ... I differ from most of 
you on most of the issues of life, and I am go¬ 
ing to keep it up.” 

Such were the ideas. As his speech pro¬ 
gressed it would almost have been possible to 
draw a line down the hall between those for 
and those against. On one side, with a few ex¬ 
ceptions, were the elders, unmoved and stolid. 
On the other were the youngsters, leaning for¬ 
ward, their faces working with emotion, leaping 
from their seats to shout and cheer as bolts fell. 
By turns the place would burst into thunders 
of applause, then as suddenly hush to a stillness 
in which you could hear your own breathing. 

At the end the whole gathering seemed to go 
off its head. Some cheered. Some pounded 
the tables. Some sat perfectly still with tears 
streaming down their faces. Some gathered at 
one side of the hall and sang the college hymn. 
Some made a dash for the speaker. It was one 
of those significant mixtures of the sublime and 
the comic. The center of it all was once more 
his diffident self of daily life, a little dazed, like 
one who has come out from a state of posses- 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 171 

sion; articulate, conversible, but inwardly at an 
infinite remove from all this. 

So ends the drama. There was an epilogue 
of eight professorial resignations: Gaus, 
Agard, Stewart, Ayres, Fitch, Ilinners, Saun¬ 
ders, Scatchard—and Hamilton who had, how¬ 
ever, resolved to leave before the crisis came. 
It was an epilogue with abundant comic relief, 
rich in that paradox of lives dedicated to an 
other than personal career—the losers hilar¬ 
ious as victors and the victors glum as defeat. 

Why should they be hilarious? The answer 
is all in that final scene at the gymnasium. 
What occurred there was a something which 
lies close to the core of all religions. Stake 
and flames, hemp and tar-kettle, were happily 
absent. But you had, if not a man, certainly a 
valiant and vital enterprise perishing for an 
ideal. And you had a man, several men, in a 
bitter situation meeting it without bitterness. 
I am not going to call this Christianity. That 
word has been too badly battered. It was a 
Something which existed in the heart of man 
long before Christianity was heard of and 



172 


PROPHETS UNAWARES 


which will exist long after Christianity, in name 
at least, is no more than a memory. This 
Something is so much the soul and center of 
universal religious experience that wherever it 
appears—as it did here—it lets light into the 
whole region round about; and into whatsoever 
lives it streams, those lives it illumines ever¬ 
lastingly. To have been in that gymnasium 
and to have felt that Something was life, the 
only life there is. To have been in that gymna¬ 
sium and not to have felt that Something was 
death, the only death there is. And, as men 
weep both in the presence of death and of birth, 
so those young men wept, as well they might. 
What happened there among the flying-rings 
and pulley-weights of a gymnasium was that 
the Idea, in the moment of its perishing out of 
an institution, reincarnated in the souls and 
bodies of several hundred young men, where it 
will live and work and bring forth good fruit 
an hundredfold. 









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